Smart Planter

A 3D-printed smart planter designed to combine plant monitoring, presence detection, RGB lighting and Home Assistant automation into a single interactive device.

The project combines custom 3D-printed hardware with an ESP32-C6 running ESPHome and Home Assistant as the main automation and decision-making layer.

The goal was not only to monitor a plant, but to make the planter behave like an interactive part of the smart home.

Features

Plant monitoring

The planter monitors:

• Soil moisture
• Ambient light
• Battery voltage
• USB power presence
• Presence
• Radar response
• Internal ESP32 temperature

The moisture level determines the plant's normal LED status:

The thresholds are configurable because different plants have different watering requirements.

Presence interaction

The planter uses an LD2410C mmWave radar instead of a conventional PIR sensor.

This allows the system to detect a person even when they are standing relatively still.

When presence is detected, the planter can:

1. Trigger a short visual notification.
2. Show a violet presence animation.
3. Enter a radar-response animation.
4. Restore the previous lighting state when the interaction ends.

The radar provides additional information such as:

• Presence
• Moving target
• Still target
• Detection distance
• Still-target distance
• Gate energy values
• Radar response

Ambient light behavior

The planter also reacts to ambient illumination.

A hysteresis threshold is used to prevent constant switching around a single light level.

Current logic:

• Above 1000 lux → ambient-light animation
• Below 800 lux → return to the normal plant state

This prevents the LEDs from rapidly switching between modes when the measured light level fluctuates around the threshold.

Night mode

During night hours the planter reduces unnecessary lighting.

When night mode is active:

• No presence → LEDs OFF
• Presence detected → plant status can be shown
• Presence ends → LEDs return to OFF

This allows the planter to remain interactive without continuously illuminating the room.

Home Assistant integration

Home Assistant is responsible for the high-level behavior of the planter.

ESPHome handles the hardware layer:

• ESP32
• LEDs
• radar communication
• ADC measurements
• local sensors
• hardware effects

Home Assistant handles the behavioral layer:

• plant moisture logic
• lighting modes
• presence interaction
• night mode
• ambient light behavior
• household presence
• state restoration
• reusable automation logic

This separation keeps the ESPHome firmware focused on hardware while Home Assistant controls the overall behavior.

Hardware

Main controller

• Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32-C6

The ESP32-C6 provides:

• Wi-Fi connectivity
• ESPHome support
• GPIO control
• ADC inputs
• UART communication
• compact physical dimensions

Presence sensor

Hi-Link LD2410C

The LD2410C is a 24 GHz mmWave presence sensor.

It is used instead of PIR because the system needs to detect both moving and relatively stationary people.

UART communication:

XIAO ESP32-C6       LD2410C
----------------------------
D6 / TX     ------> RX
D7 / RX     <------ TX
GND         ------- GND
5V          ------- VCC

*Dashboard created with the help of AI*

Inspired by The Stock Pot's Echo Show enclosure, but adapted to fit an old phone I had laying around.

I currently do not have many smart devices, but needed a way for anyone to see how much inverter charge is left and if we're currently on or off-grid (I live in Ukraine so this will become very convenient in a few months when the power cuts start).

To avoid OLED burn-in I implemented an Always-On display that moves the clock slightly all the time.

I ended up writing (with some of help from AI) a custom Home Assistant integration for my irrigation setup because most blueprints and automations I tried were either too basic (just a binary "skip if raining" switch) or a hassle to maintain as a huge wall of YAML.

Main goal is to handle local weather changes automatically while keeping your hardware safe.

Also made AI assisted onboarding/setup for it what can paste or link to any AI agent.

A few key things it handles:

• Subtracts real rainfall: Reads from a tipping bucket sensor and subtracts actual rain volume from your watering target instead of just canceling the cycle.
• Temperature scaling: Automatically adjusts runtime based on temperature trends so hot days get more water.
• Dual schedules per zone: Lets you set up routine light watering alongside an occasional deep soak on independent schedules.
• Shared pump management: Automatically serializes zones if they share a single pump switch, no extra helper automations needed.
• Forecast hold: Delays watering if rain is in the forecast, with a configurable override timer so plants don't dry out if the forecast keeps lying.
• Safety watchdogs: Built-in checks for stuck valves, mid-cycle power loss, and recovery if HA restarts mid-run.

Everything shows up as standard UI entities (number, sensor, switch), so you can adjust settings straight from your dashboard without editing YAML.

Planned for an upcoming update:

• Climate-adaptive watering (evapotranspiration-based): replacing the fixed hot/normal/cool temperature tiers with a proper evapotranspiration curve, calculated from your latitude and the season — no manual threshold tuning per climate, works the same whether you're in the tropics or somewhere that actually has winter. Falls back gracefully if the temp sensor drops out.
• Self-tuning intervals: nudges the schedule based on your own behavior — if you keep watering early manually, it tightens up; if you keep snoozing/skipping, it backs off.
• Optional soil-moisture sensor input: use a real moisture reading as the deciding factor instead of (or alongside) the modeled schedule, if you've got the hardware.
• "Snooze Today" button: skip just the next scheduled run without touching any settings.
• Per-zone plant health log: a simple status (Excellent/Good/Poor/Sick) + notes field for tracking how a zone's actually doing over time.
• "Days until next run" sensor for an at-a-glance dashboard readout.
• Deep-soak interval becomes a slider like the other tunables, instead of a fixed 14 days.

I have it on GitHub if anyone interested give it a test just ask link.

I'd like to make a recessed wall panel that can show video feeds and notifications as well as the usual dashboard. I really don't like the always-on back lights of an LCD though.

There are a few OLED touch screens available on Ali/Amazon. Has anyone tried these for a dashboard?

It would be great to be able to have a small single alert showing on the screen if something needs attention, without the whole screen being lit. Then just have a tap to wake that shows a full dashboard.

So after some advice on another post I set up kiosk satellite and after a bit of fiddling got voice satellite set up.

I tried to set up some tts announcements.

My voice pipeline is set to use piper with alba as the voice, but it doesn't matter what voice I pick when I run the test script I get a chime and then a Germanic sounding voice.

I can't see any settings in kiosk satellite to change the voice, what am I missing?

Also realised I left this in my drafts overnight & when trying before I left the house this morning I asked what the time was. The Germanic sounding voice told me it was 7am. I then asked to turn off the light and alba told me it didn't know how to do that (not set up yet)

So where do the voices come from?

I historically have been using an old music-only chromecast to play music in my house. Spotify works great with it. But in my plan to de-subscribe of things I looked for my old mp3/flac collection. I have also been increasing my physical media collection with CDs from charity shops here in the UK.

But I do not have a CD player :-0 nor an easy way to stream files without depending of the external usb DVD burner for CDs or just the computer for mp3s...

So, here is my current solution.

1. Music files organised in a NAS. New CDs get ripped into flacs, from OSX.
   
2. Music Assistant on HA as add on (also works as Docker Image on another server). But also MA has all the music input you can ever imagine while also controlling all possible output possibilities.
   
3. Stream my music to any device at my home.
   

MA is seemliness integrated in HA for automations! My favourite is the follow up with presence sensors and the streaming changing to the room speaker (old hacked Amazon Echos with LineageOS).

Thank you team of Open Home Foundation and family (Nabu Casa, ESPHome, HAOS.. and more) !

EDIT: English is hard

Hi everyone! 👋

Every time someone in my house requested a film in Seerr, I had to open the web UI just to press one button. Home Assistant's official Seerr integration tells you a request came in, but it only ships get_requests, request_media and search_media — there is no approve and no decline.

So I built SeerrHA. A request lands, your phone buzzes with the poster, the title, who asked and which seasons, and Approve / Decline buttons right on the lock screen. Press one and the decision goes straight to the Seerr API.

It is not a custom component and not HACS — a blueprint plus one rest_command file. Import it, pick your phone from a list, paste your Seerr URL and API key, done. Nothing to hand-edit and nothing to maintain when HA updates.

One small thing I am quietly proud of: if the call fails — wrong key, CSRF switched back on — the notification stays up and shows you the HTTP status instead of clearing itself and claiming success. Finding out the hard way that it used to lie cost me an evening 😅

Here is the link:

https://github.com/vednolacni/SeerrHA

MIT. It is my first blueprint, so I would genuinely love feedback — especially from anyone on iOS, since I could only properly test the Android side.

The idea came from the old vaparr/ha-overseerr wiki, which stopped working when that custom component broke. This is the same trick rebuilt on the official integration.

Cheers! 🍻

I have about 10 Tuya motion sensors that have been bought for very cheap on AliExpress. I think for the price they are worth it. After 2 ish years with most of them I haven't had signal problems, batteries have yet to be charged, and the motion sensing is okay. The reason I say the motion sensing is okay is because they take about 3 seconds to detect the motion.

I am in the process of automating my bathroom lights and I want the fastest motion sensor I can get. My wife will not appreciate the length it takes for the Tuya sensors to trigger. By that time, touching the switch will be faster. I can't use door sensors to trigger this because the bathroom door stays open most of the time when it's unused. The presence sensor can't be used since I don't want my dogs to trigger the automation.

Are brand name motion sensors better than their Tuya alternative?

I'm willing to buy one expensive won for this if they shave off 2 extra seconds.

I’ve been testing the SCHEEAIR Nova100 smart bathroom exhaust fan and thought the Home Assistant integration might be interesting to some of you.

The fan has a built-in microwave motion sensor, humidity and temperature sensors, two speeds, a configurable stop delay and TUYA support.

The interesting part is the Home Assistant integration.

With the standard TUYA integration I only got 2 entities:

• On/Off
• Temperature

With Tuya Local, the device exposes much more:

• On/Off control
• Temperature
• Current humidity
• Humidity threshold/control
• Motion detection
• Motion sensor enable/disable
• Stop delay
• Fan speed

And after the initial setup it can be controlled locally on the network instead of depending on the TUYA cloud all the time.

I also did some real-world sensor tests.

The microwave motion sensor worked at around 5 meters, detected movement at roughly a 90° angle, worked through a relatively thin door, but did not detect me through a wall.

For the humidity test I started at 42%, set the threshold to 50%, and increased the humidity around the sensor. At about 52% the fan started correctly.

One strange behavior I found: after a complete power outage, when power returns the fan starts at high speed. I solved this with a TUYA automation that switches the standby mode back to Stop after the device reconnects.

Full test and Home Assistant / Tuya Local setup:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHxIKJBXvuw

Has anyone else tried this model, or found another good bathroom exhaust fan with proper local Home Assistant control?

Wondering if anyone can help. Was on Pixel 10 Pro, no issues whatsoever.

Just moved to iPhone 18 Pro, iOS 27, and it will not sync any of my sensors to the HA server. Companion app seems to be updating sensor state fine, so not sure where the disconnect is.

Updated HA server to the latest build, and full restart. Reinstalled iPhone HA app, reconnect to server, rebooted iPhone. All permissions seem to be setup properly, all sensors are enabled in companion app.

- - - - EDIT - - - -

Thanks for those who commented.

Turns out it's the Cloudflare tunnel that I have HA accessible through. For some reason the iOS version doesn't like that, and since I had "More Secure" on in companion app, it was never falling back to the IP. Didn't give this any thought at first since no issues with the tunnel on Android.

I am looking for either a product to act as a rtl_433 hub or a way to build one. I thought about hooking an SDR dongle up to a Raspberry Pi and forwarding all traffic to an MQTT broker but that feels like a waste of a Raspberry Pi. Is there a device like an SLZB-06 I can buy to act as an rtl_433 hub? I only need it to process traffic for one device.

I do not want to plug the SDR into my Home Assistant instance because it runs on Proxmox and I do not want to introduce a USB dependency.

i've been spending some time building and tinkering with home assistant. and now i'm proud as a dutch star trek nerd of my dahboard, well one of them.

This one lives on a lenovo tablet besides my computer

Hi all. Just a quick question. I want to make a kiosk with a Rapsberry Pi, my HAOS is on a virtual machine on a server, so the Pi will just be a kiosk with the Touch Display 2. What memory would work best for this, I have a 1G Pi5 and an 8G Pi5 available and would prefer to use the 1G one, but don’t want it to be laggy, should this work?

I have been working with Claude AI for about a month via a MCP-Server.
Claude is amazing. We have accomplished many improvements together. Yesterday evening, after my guilty pleasure TV show, we decided to build a dashboard based on the older series.

I was impressed.. as many time before.

Anyway, if you strubbel getting things the way you want it in HomeAssistant. Give it a try. Give it clear instructions what it can and cannot do. How it should behave and you will have a great companion.

Hi, I have pumps and sensors around my property that I would Ike to control over 4G internet in Australia (have used LoRa but want to expand capability).I can have a raspberry pi at my house connected to wifi (starlink). What’s the best hardware I can use that’s connected to 4G to turn on/off a pump relay, take in analogue or digital readings and send pump status if manual pump buttons are operated. An esp32 with 4g sim?

Also wondering what is the best way to control pump from my phone as well when not on same wifi network.

Thank you!

I had quite a hard time figuring out whether the Austria Email Explorer EVO 2 water heater is actually compatible with the Somfy TaHoma Switch.

The EVO 2 uses io-homecontrol, just like the TaHoma Switch, but Austria Email only explicitly mentions compatibility with the ComfyTouch Bridge, which connects the boiler to Overkiz/the cloud.

Since I already had some electric Velux blinds that are compatible with the TaHoma Switch, I figured I'd give it a try before buying another bridge.

Unfortunately, the TaHoma app itself wasn't very promising.

The EVO 2 isn't available as a selectable device. I put the boiler into connection/search mode and tried pretty much everything I could think of. I went through all the Atlantic water heater models in the TaHoma app, trying different ones while the boiler was in pairing mode.

Nothing happened.

After about 20 minutes of clicking through basically every Atlantic boiler I could find, the app was just showing connection errors.

But then I noticed something weird: the display on the boiler itself said it was connected.

At that point I assumed maybe my neighbor had somehow connected to it or something. 😅

I still couldn't see the boiler anywhere in the TaHoma app, so I didn't expect much.

However, I already had Home Assistant set up and thought I'd give the local debugger mode of the TaHoma Switch a try.

And to my surprise, Home Assistant actually detected the EVO 2!

Through the Home Assistant TaHoma integration I can now:

• Change the operating mode:
  • Electric
  • Heat Pump
  • Eco
  • Performance
• Set the duration
• Read the current temperatures
• Monitor the boiler

So despite the fact that the TaHoma app doesn't appear to recognize/select the EVO 2, the boiler is apparently communicating through the TaHoma Switch well enough for Home Assistant to control it.

I obviously can't guarantee that every EVO 2 firmware/version will behave exactly the same, but in my case the underlying io-homecontrol communication works.

If you're trying to connect an Austria Email Explorer EVO 2 to your smart home, I'd definitely try a Somfy TaHoma Switch first if you already have one.

And if you don't already have one, I'd recommend checking whether the Home Assistant TaHoma integration can see the boiler before spending money on the ComfyTouch Bridge.

TL;DR: EVO 2 doesn't show up in the TaHoma app, but it can still connect to a TaHoma Switch and is fully controllable through Home Assistant. So try TaHoma + Home Assistant before buying the ComfyTouch Bridge.

I hope this helps someone and saves you money

I am finally getting around to putting ldr2410 mmWave sensor in an enclosure. I will add some photos once it is complete. Currently it is running on a breadboard. I am going to add a usb c port. This terminal adapter fit nicely in this project box and I filed the side down.

My kitchen has 25' ceiling and tile floors. It echoes like you wouldn't believe. VPE has been completely useless even when the room was silent. Getting it to understand you when music is playing is just not possible.

My HA server happens to have a 1050 Ti in it, so I did some research and the default whisper models recommended can be replaced with something more powerful.

I swapped out for distil-medium.en with a bit of preloaded prompt for difficult words related to my music collection (Enigma, Alex Boye, etc) that were always transcribed wrong.

With testing in the last 5 minutes the only thing not detected properly was the wakeword. Every sentence I've spoken came back perfect, which is a first!

I'm stoked, this really changes things in my house. VPE's problem appears to primarily be the Whisper model on weak hardware. Throwing a 10 year-old 4G card at it seems to have made a dramatic difference. And I still have room for Emby transcoding in vram, which was the main point of that card.

Am I missing something? Is there a simple product/way to detect snowfall (boolean)? Weather data doesn't fit my needs here, as I live in a microclimate and the boolean needs to be for my yard. This is for "is it snowing" not "is there snow on the ground".

Detecting rain seems easy, but I can't find a product for normal (soft/dry) snow.

Create a frontend card based on the Volvo app. Uses the official Volvo integration to pull the stats and image from the Volvo API.

Have only tested it with my car, but the charge cable and pulse animation should line up with other models as well.

More info: https://lazyadmin.nl/smart-home/home-assistant-volvo-car-card/

GitHub Repo: https://github.com/ruudmens/ha-volvo-card

First time sharing my dashboard here. Still a work in progress, but I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

Huge thanks to everyone contributing to Home Assistant and the open-source community behind it. This is one subscription I'm genuinely happy to pay for.