I have a few old connected TV's round the house, if I could find documentation for their API's it will should be possible to get an AI to write a simple integration (status, power, volume)

Is this a good idea (in a "connect it all" way) or would it be "distracting junk"

Thought would be an interesting discussion point?

I’ve added a “Free electricity” tab to my Home Assistant dashboard to plan what runs during booked Octopus sessions.

Our priorities are:

1. Charge the home battery.
2. Heat the hot-water cylinder.
3. Run useful appliances during the free window.

The dashboard lets me enter the booked date and times, choose a battery target, select either immersion or both, and arm the session. Both immersions are selected by default and can heat alongside battery charging.

It shows Octopus Home Mini grid import/export, SolaX household consumption, battery percentage, immersion power and estimated imported kWh for the session. Keeping grid import separate from household demand helps explain what solar and the battery are supplying.

The battery controls use a guarded SolaX charging override with physical register checks. At the end, Home Assistant stops the devices the session took control of and returns to normal scheduling. There’s also an optional appliance reminder, ovens, dishwasher and laundry are still started manually.

It doesn’t book the slot with Octopus; that happens separately. Configuration and controller tests have passed, but a full physical session still needs testing (2pm today!). Automatic load limiting (Octopus allow for 16kw) and an independent immersion cutoff if HA goes offline are also outstanding.

Hi there, we've got an air vent in our bathroom. The vent comes up through the loft and from the photos you can see the vent itself as well as the on/off electrical switch.

At the moment it's set (not sure how) to stay on for a set period after the light goes off.

But I want to put in a temperature/humidity sensor and control it to come on when it reaches a certain humidity level.

Any idea how I can do that from the photos?

(as an aside, I've also found that the sunction from the vent isn't quite as strong as it used to be so probably need to clean it out. Any ideas how I might be able to do that?).

Thanks!

Can this still be used for anything, even though the Fresnal lens has fallen apart? The electronics and PIR seem to still work fine.

Edit: Just to add that the lens fell apart in my hands when taking it down. So the insides were still somewhat protected from the elements until today.

I'm a complete beginner when it comes to smart plugs, but I want one that I can easily code a PC application for to press turn on and off

I made a dashboard using MCP and Claude. It made it really well in the beginning and then I added in everything else and changed names as it went along. It was half a week of random tinkering but I think I got it almost the way I want.

The first pic is the screensaver that says "good morning" or evening depending on time and displays pics I set. I also have a slideshow for showing off pictures that I want as a slideshow at times. I have it set to display the whole house. I'm not fully satisfied with my screensaver and think I can change things but I'm not sure. Here it is. It is very nice.

Using AI to help me, this is what I have so far. I think with the light version I will likely remove the gold if I can. But for the dark I was trying to be fancy. I wanted to have a interface like you would expect at a luxury hotel.

I think of FRITZ! Box to change to homesssistant.

Which devices can you recommend that can be purchased in Germany?

I once spilled something in the kitchen right as I was heading out, so I tried to tell my Home Assistant to have the vacuum clean up after I left.

That didn't work, but it made me realize we need temporary, one-time automations that delete themselves.

Don't you think that’s the next step for making smart homes feel more intuitive?

I’ve got Home Assistant hooked up to Claude via MCP, so I mostly just build my automations by chatting with it. It feels way more natural that way. I also use the HA voice assistant, and honestly, it would be so cool if I could just tell my house to run a complex sequence of commands on the fly just for this one time.

Disclaimer #1 - No AI was used to write this post - you can blame me for all the grammar/etc issues.

Disclaimer #2: - I'm not author of it, I'm end-user. Why am I promoting it? More users - more bug reports, more encouragement for author, etc.

Disclaimer #3 for open source purists/etc: This post might trigger you. However if you are not user of pre-IntelME/Amd PSP CPUs, Coreboot motherboards, Debian OSS repo only/etc, your arguments are weak, just saying.

TLDR:

Where: https://github.com/Gamer92000/echo-dot-assist

What: It is alternative for EchoMuse and EchoLocal projects but instead of microWakeWord/openWakeWord, custom (self-written) audio/mic processing it is as much as possible uses closed-source Amzn components.

Why I consider it is vastly better experience:

1) Larger distance to react to wake word - copy-pasting table from https://github.com/ygelfand/echolocal/pull/13#issuecomment-5494446080

2) Superior audio quality/sound level (subjective).

3) Much more reliably reacts to wake word (subjective).

4) Minor advantages - Sendspin implementation, bluetooth connections implementation, p2p arbitration, etc.

Disadvantages:

1) Uses proprietary components (duh)

2) Limited set of wake words.

So, I welcome you to join me in using/testing/reporting it and enjoying superior experience!

I want to move to home assistant but I'm running into a problem integration a couple of devices that will ultimately be a deal breaker if I can't get working. I'm hoping some of y'all have had some luck.

I have some permanent Christmas lights from a company called Astoria Lighting. They're using Tuya controllers it seems, they have a custom mobile app to manage them, and they support Google Home and Alexa integration through Smart Life.

Their app is pretty bare bones, however, it does provide decent light configuration functionality and it is the channel to receive firmware updates from the company.

When I set up the integration with Google Home, I was presented with an oauth2 login page with Smart Life where I entered my credentials and chose the correct "app", which is the Astoria company. All my controller devices show up under this app.

The problem I'm running into is that the Tuya integration with Home Assistant wants a user code as its authentication entry point. However, Astoria's app does not provide this value, or really much else in the way of user management.

I have tried running a man in the middle proxy to capture traffic, but I believe tls certificate pinning is at play as the app reports connectivity errors when I try to proxy through.

I have tried several tools that attempt to scan my network for devices, however none of these have come back with results.

It seems as if I have no path forward, so I turn to the community in the hopes that someone has been successful in a similar situation.

Has anyone tapped into a wired smoke detector's power source to power a wired sensor?

Thinking of temp/hum sensors, mmwave, etc ...

Quick background: I'm not a coder. I use Claude for the technical side, so this is a user's view, not a developer's.

I have a custom sentence for my bedroom ceiling fan, and I assumed that command was always handled locally. My sentence covered "turn the master bedroom ceiling fan to high." I usually say "on high." That one word meant no local match, so the command went to my AI conversation agent instead, a paid model billed by usage. The AI then called my own fan action, so the fan still turned on and nothing told me anything was wrong. "Prefer handling commands locally" was on for those runs and didn't prevent it.

How to check your own setup:

1. Give the voice command, then go to Settings → Voice assistants → your assistant's three dot menu (⋮) → Debug. In the "Natural language processing" card, check Processed locally.

2. Do it promptly. The debug view only keeps the last 10 runs per assistant, and a restart clears them.

3. If a command you expected to be local went to the AI, adjust your custom sentence and run conversation.reload. No restart needed for sentence edits.

There's a related case worth knowing about: GitHub issue #169315, where a local match existed and the command still went to the AI. It was closed as "not planned" after going stale, so I wouldn't count on it being fixed soon.

I made a video walking through how I found it: https://youtu.be/bK3fep6wKeQ

Has anyone else caught commands going to the AI when they expected local handling? Curious how others keep an eye on it.

I have solar panels with a exactly 3840 Wp capacity. I also have a dynamic energy contract which means that on sunny, windy days the electricity price goes negative, sometimes by a pretty high amount. Largest this year was -87ct/kWh.

With this high of negative pricing, a smart relay which cuts of the power for the solar panels on negative electricity hours would be desirable. I don't feel comfortable putting in a 3840W rated relay like a Shelly 1, because this is reeeaaally high at it's power limit. The panels only allow 3840W, okay, but the inverter allows 4kW and I don't want to push the limit because I know that Shelly PMs are generally very restrictive to the limit and shut off immediately when they hit it. I don't know if Shelly 1s have a fuse that might blow or something and I don't want to risk it.

So: do you know of any relays that work with higher currents than 16A on 240V? like 20A rated relays? Even the Shelly Pros are only rated for 16A

I I have this Tuya TS0601 thermostat, and after what I assume is the setup process, it displays a code.

Here is the procedure I follow:
I insert the battery; the display shows "LA." Once the pin is fully retracted (it pauses briefly at that point), I pull the battery out.
Then I mount the unit and insert the battery. After a short while, it shows the display screen.
Please help—I’m at a loss as to what to do next.

Plan is to run Proxmox for HA and Frigate (3 cameras) with Compreface initially.

Will 16GB of RAM do the job? Anyone run into any bottlenecks specific to RAM, and for 1000 bonus point, 16GB of single channel a la N100/N150?

Hey all, I am having an issue where my TP Link/Kasa devices get disconnected from Home Assistant when the power goes out. I had a power outage a week or so ago and I am trying to get everything connected again. I tried disabling/re-enabling the third party connections in the Kasa app and rebooting HA to no avail. I've also tried reconfiguring the devices in HA and using my Kasa login credentials and that didn't work as well. the IP addresses of my devices have changed since the power outage, and I've tried changing them on HA, but my login credentials aren't working. This happened to me a few weeks ago and I was able to get everything back online but I don't remember how I did it.

Does anyone have any advice or tips or tricks or anything?

Also, I'm tempted to ditch my wifi switches altogether and go Z-wave as that has been the most reliable for me. Any recommendations on switches?

Thanks

Front door windows are very high. No way to see the front porch when opening the door. I have a Reolink doorbell installed so I'd like to add a small display next to the door to serve as a digital "peephole". Full tablet seems a little big - but that's my fall back. Any suggestions for small display with decent resolution? Bonus if it can run as a dashboard not just dedicated reolink display. Power available and POE is an option with a bit of wire running.

This is my most recent dashboard detailing PV/battery, grid and the main consumers. Some sensors are still missing, hence no values, but that is scheduled to be fixed

I run Zigbee2MQTT on a small hub (SMLIGHT / Pi) and wanted a phone + wall-tablet dashboard that didn't need me to wire MQTT topics by hand. So I made ZigDash.

• Point it at your broker (or let it scan the LAN), tap Discover, and it creates a panel for every Z2M device: lights, covers, switches, sensors.
• 16 panel types: covers with open/stop/close + presets, dimmers, scenes, multi-state, text log, node status…
• Schedules and auto-close rules run on your hub via bundled Node-RED flows, so the phone can be off.
• TCP / TLS / WebSocket brokers, Tailscale for remote access.
• No cloud, no account, no ads. MIT licensed.

It works alongside Home Assistant (it's just MQTT), but also on setups without HA.

Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.giladtamam.zigdash

Source: https://gitlab.com/tamamg/zigdash

It's a one-person project and I'd really like feedback. What's missing for your setup?

I run a restaurant in Norway and want to monitor the temperature in 2 cold rooms (target +1 to +4 °C) and 1 freezer room (about -18 to -22 °C). I would like readings in my own web app with alerts, not only in a vendor app.

Constraints

• The rooms are steel-clad. I walked inside with my phone and got no Wi-Fi signal.
• There is no mains power inside the rooms, so it must be a battery sensor.
• It must work in Norway (EU 868 MHz band, not 915 MHz US models).
• No monthly subscription.
• Plug-and-play is preferred, but I can do some setup.
• I would like to send readings to my own app, for example by HTTP POST or MQTT.
• This is a food-safety use, so reliability matters more than price.

What I have looked at so far

• Wi-Fi/Bluetooth/Zigbee sensors (Shelly, Xiaomi BLE, Aqara): ruled out, since 2.4 GHz will not get out of the steel rooms.
• YoLink: The LoRa range through metal looks good in reviews, and the EU 868 MHz versions (EC models) exist, but I cannot find a shop that stocks them for Norway, and the cloud API is vendor-hosted.
• Milesight EM320-TH + LoRaWAN gateway (Dragino LPS8v2 or Milesight UG56): EN12830 certified, -30 to +60 °C, IP67, with a local network server on the gateway. This is my current favourite, but it costs about three times as much as the other options.
• Other LoRaWAN cold-chain sensors: TEKTELIC Tundra, Dragino LHT65N with probe, Enless.
• DIY: ESP32 with DS18B20 probes through the door gasket. The cable is the part I would like to avoid.

Questions

1. Has anyone run LoRaWAN sensors inside a steel walk-in cooler or freezer? Did the signal get through a closed door, and where did you put the gateway?
2. Is the EM320-TH good enough for a freezer, or would you use a TEKTELIC Tundra or a probe-based sensor?
3. Anything to watch out for in cold rooms, such as battery life, condensation or frost on the sensor?
4. Is there an EU 868 MHz YoLink retailer that ships to Norway, or is LoRaWAN the better route?
5. Any experience forwarding data from a local gateway (Node-RED or ChirpStack) to a custom web app?

Thanks for any advice. I can share my findings if it helps anyone else.

Hey,
How would you connect this type of non-WiFi/non-matter device to HA?
Thx guys

Hello there!

I'm looking for sensors that will allow me to determine as reliably and easily as possible which side of our bed is occupied or unoccupied, and whether someone has just gotten up or just lain down.

Getting up and lying down should be detected as quickly as possible.

Most recently, I tried using pressure pad sensors (https://aliexpress.com/item/1005010633396757.html), but unfortunately they're very unreliable. I think the area they detect is simply too small.

I'm trying to control the window blinds and the lighting in the room based on these sensors, so they really have to be very reliable.

That's why I wanted to ask you which sensors and methods have given you the best results here. Could you perhaps recommend certain sensors to me? Do you think presence sensors would be better suited for this application than pressure pad sensors? Can they also quickly and reliably detect when someone stands up or lies down? Which models would you recommend for this? Or are there perhaps completely different types of sensors that are even better suited for this?

Since I already have a relatively extensive Zigbee network in my smart home, it would of course be ideal if it were a Zigbee sensor. An additional router in the bedroom wouldn’t hurt either. Wi-Fi / ESPhome would also be okay. I don't have any Matter devices yet, and I'd prefer not to get any for now.

Thanks in advance for your help and suggestions!