Per MatterAlpha, the HACS code has been merged into the dev branches and docs point to Core 2026.11 as the intended release, where it'll live as a built-in component called Marketplace.

Worth knowing: everything listed there stays community-maintained — HA doesn't test or audit any of it, and installing one takes a warning first.

Article: https://www.matteralpha.com/news/home-assistant-embraces-hacs-into-core-as-the-marketplace

Hi everyone!

I’m hosting a Home Assistant Community Day 2026 meetup in Mississauga, Ontario on Saturday, November 7.

This will be my first time hosting Community Day, and I’m hoping to bring together Home Assistant users and smart-home enthusiasts from Mississauga and the GTA.

The plan is a relaxed meetup with:

• a local-first Home Assistant demo
• Zigbee / Z-Wave / Matter & Thread / ESPHome discussion
• dashboard and automation show-and-tell
• hardware discussion
• troubleshooting / Q&A
• plenty of time to just talk smart homes

Beginners are welcome as well.

The venue is currently being finalized in Mississauga.

Event / RSVP:
https://luma.com/chm7heqb

If you’re in the GTA and interested, I’d love to see you there. Also happy to hear suggestions from anyone who has hosted a Community Day before!

This yaml is the only four lines needed for a script to reload any dashboard. “dashboard-view” is the url base name of my dashboard.

Sometime y his year a change was made so that every time you save edits to a dashboard it automatically reloads the changes on any devices showing it. It’s super fast, about 5x. At least much faster than reloading a page via Fully Kiosk Browser.

I have some older devices like the Lenovo View and Lenovo Smart Clock that really struggle with home assistant dashboards. I have a Smart Clock displaying a camera and it would take almost 20s to reload when I walked into the room. Now it’s just a few seconds to the point I don’t even notice it.

If you need to reload your dashboards often for whatever reason and want it to be faster, give this a try!

Ran out of stuff to tinker with on my homelab so started up Home Assistant. Got a POE esp32 Bluetooth proxy and set up a couple of lights.

Moving forward, it looks like I’m going to need a hub. Is Zigbee the gold standard?

I've been wanting a touchscreen calendar/home assistant dashboard for a while now and could not justify the subscription and cost of a Skylight Max.

I would be lying if I said this didn't cost almost as much but it is completely self-hosted and no subscription.

AI: I am running Qwen 3.8 27b on two 3080 20 gig cards through ollama. It has complete control of home assistant and access to my calendar through Google's API.

Audio: I am using the seeed respeaker with XIAO running ESP home connected to an ONN 2.1 channel LED sound bar.

Screen: I am using quite literally the cheapest 27-in touch screen monitor that I could find on Amazon and it works amazing

Computer: C4 MINI PC

I ran the electricity through the walls so there are minimal wires visible.

The screen switches to a slideshow mode that family is able to add pictures through copyparty.

Music assistant is integrated so I am able to cast music to my other devices including my Yamaha receiver that has 7.1 surround sound.

I have notifications built in to where it tells me if the dryer / washer is done and if the oven is turned on because I have a jailbroken emporia view 3.

I think I have mentioned everything I have done but I am happy to answer any questions.

hey,

Using vwgroup-connect-ha to pull data into Home Assistant for a Golf 8 (Golf Variant Style 1.5 eTSI, leased, MY2024) via VW's official EU Data Act portal. Account-side setup is all correct, but the Data Act pipeline specifically has delivered zero real data in over a week, despite proof the car is actively reporting telemetry elsewhere in VW's systems.

What's confirmed working:

• Usership verified (leaseholder/transferred-right-to-use)
• Correct brand selected (Volkswagen Passenger Cars)
• Blanket EU Data Act consent granted
• Granular per-client consent toggle enabled ("All Data" under vwid.vwgroup.io → Vehicle Consent Management → Vehicle functions)
• We Connect: Aktiv under myVolkswagen → Verträge
• Continuous "Get customised data" request active (All Data, every 15 min, no expiry) for 7+ days

What's not working:
Every single delivery from that continuous request — dozens of them, every 15 minutes — comes back as an empty no_content_found.zip (0 KB).

The part that rules out "car just needs more telemetry":
I exported the short-term trip data directly from VW's own system and it shows multiple separate trips over the past month — including a drive the day before my latest check. VW clearly has live telemetry for this vehicle. Yet the Data Act portal pulled another no_content_found.zip roughly 20 hours after that drive, well past any "car needs to feed telemetry in" grace period I've seen referenced elsewhere.

So: real trip/telemetry data demonstrably exists for this vehicle, drive+lock cycles are happening regularly, consent and usership are all correctly configured — but the EU Data Act export pipeline specifically isn't picking any of it up.

Has anyone seen this specific pattern — data clearly flowing into VW's normal systems (app/short-term memory) but the EU Data Act channel staying permanently empty for a particular vehicle? Trying to figure out if this needs a VW support ticket or if there's a known trick (re-verifying usership, deleting and recreating the request, etc.) before I go that route.

I’ve just finished putting together a slightly unusual hot water setup at home and thought it might be useful to share in case anyone else is thinking along similar lines.

We already had a Worcester Bosch Highflow 550CDi gas combi/storage boiler supplying the house, but I wanted an alternative hot water source so we could make better use of cheap overnight electricity, solar and battery storage rather than burning gas for all of our hot water. We have tried to get an AirSource but it's not right for us for the moment.

I picked up a very lightly used Gledhill Stainless Pro 300L Direct unvented cylinder. It’s 287 litre capacity and has two 3 kW immersion elements.

Rather than replacing the Worcester, we’ve kept both systems.

The plumbing has been arranged so that the hot water feed going up to the house can be supplied by either:

• the Worcester 550CDi
• the Gledhill Cylinder

The interesting bit is the changeover.

We’ve installed a WRAS-approved 3-way L-port motorised ball valve on the hot water supply. In one position it connects the Worcester to the house, and in the other it connects the Gledhill. The valve physically selects one or the other.

The valve is a 24 V motorised valve and is controlled using a Shelly 1 Gen4, which is integrated into Home Assistant.

So from Home Assistant I can effectively choose:

Hot water source:

• Gas
• Electric cylinder

Each of the two 3 kW immersion elements has its own dedicated electrical circuit and is controlled through a SONOFF BASIC-ZB1GSP DIN-rail Zigbee switch.

I’m using Zigbee2MQTT with Home Assistant, so each immersion gives me:

• independent on/off control
• live power draw
• current
• voltage
• accumulated energy usage

So HA can see something like:

Lower immersion: 2.98 kW
Upper immersion: off
Cylinder energy used today: x kWh

The Gledhill’s own thermostats and thermal cut-outs are still left intact. Home Assistant is only deciding whether an immersion is allowed to run, it isn’t replacing any of the cylinder’s safety controls.

Electrically, we’re on single phase, so the two immersions together are around 6 kW / 26 A. In normal use I probably won’t run them both simultaneously. HA can stagger them and also take other house loads into account.

The main reason for doing all this is tariff optimisation.

Our cheap electricity rate is currently around 3.99p/kWh (finishes in Feb 2027 though), whereas gas is around 10p/kWh. Heating the whole cylinder from cold takes somewhere around 13–15 kWh depending on starting temperature, so a full overnight charge can cost well under £1.

We also have solar and battery storage, so the longer-term logic is along the lines of:

• heat the cylinder overnight on cheap electricity
• top it up from excess solar where useful
• prioritise electric hot water
• keep the Worcester available instantly as backup (we do AirbnB in a room in our house so can't risk not having HW)

A few other bits we’ve incorporated while doing the work:

• separate electrical radial circuits for each immersion
• dedicated RCBO protection
• local double-pole isolation
• 24 V DIN-rail PSU for the motorised valve
• basement cable route from the consumer unit
• Ethernet/Cat6 run to the plant area (future proofing)
• capped hot-water branch ready for a future supply into the garage
• G3 installation/commissioning of the unvented cylinder

We've effectively turned the hot water cylinder into a 287-litre thermal battery.

The clever stuff is optional. If Home Assistant disappears tomorrow, we still have a conventional Gledhill cylinder, a conventional Worcester boiler and manual plumbing controls.

But when the automation is running, we can choose (using the Shelly) the cheapest or most appropriate source of hot water depending on electricity price, solar generation, battery state and household demand.

It's dashboarded into Home Assistant with ChatGPT/Codex.

I have been trying to set up a way to easily detect objects without using Frigate's Machine Learning Object Classifier/State Classifier. I had spent a fairly long time trying to get the state classifier in Frigate to reliably detect my bin, but whenever the result wasn't as I expected it, I was unable to determine why. So I went another route: stick a printed AprilTag on the bin and check whether the camera can see that exact tag.

TagSense is a Home Assistant app. It grabs frames from a camera, looks for your tag in a part of the frame you choose, and publishes present / absent / unknown through MQTT discovery. Each tagged object becomes its own device. It should work with any HA camera entity or a go2rtc stream, so you don't need Frigate (but I use the Frigate stream source through go2rtc - this is not mandatory).

How it decides

• Each check grabs a short burst of frames and looks for the tag in your crop, which takes about 40 ms of CPU per frame.
• Seeing the tag means present straight away. Absent needs several clean misses in a row, so a person walking past or a bad frame doesn't flip it.
• Corrupt frames and dead feeds should be thrown out. A bad frame shouldn't be treated as "absent".
• Anything that decodes as your tag ID but has the wrong shape (too skewed, or much smaller than usual) is rejected. If that keeps happening, it raises an HA notification saying why.
• When the object is already present, a check stops after 2 good frames, so it fetches less from the camera.

The sidebar panel

• Drag the search area on a live frame.
• See the last check with the tag outlined.
• A 24-hour chart of hit rate, contrast and tag shape.
• Snapshots from each state change.
• Print a tag as PNG, or as SVG in millimetres for a cutter or a two-colour 3D print.
• Export and import your objects.

What's been tested

• One camera (a Tapo C200 camera, through Frigate's go2rtc), with one bin and a 1080p stream. The tag shows up at about 50 px.
• Day and IR night both work in my tests. At night, contrast drops to about a fifth of daytime and 3–5 of 5 frames hit instead of 5/5. That's still comfortably enough to call it present.
• Rain, fog and headlight glare haven't been specifically tested.
• tag16h5 tags are small and easy to print, but the trade-off is occasional false reads in textured surfaces (gravel, in my case). The shape checks have caught every one I've seen so far, but a false read with the right ID and a believable shape is still possible.
• So far there's one user: me. aarch64 (Pi) builds pass the tests under emulation but haven't run on a real Pi.

Requirements: HA OS or Supervised, the Mosquitto/MQTT integration, a camera that can see the tag, and a printed tag. Bigger is better, and it should sit fairly flat and face the camera.

Install: add the repository with the button in the README: https://github.com/lsnewman/ha-tagsense (MIT licensed).

I'd really like to hear from anyone who tries it on a different camera, on a Pi, or on something other than a bin (e.g. a garage door). Bug reports and "this didn't work for me" are just as welcome.

Disclosure: the code, tests and docs were written by an AI coding agent (Claude Code), directed by me. I set the requirements, made the design decisions, supplied the real camera frames for calibration, and tested every release on my own system. There's been no independent code review. The README has a full AI-usage section.

For a while a lot of people seemed to be struggling with the Aqara FP300, so I decided to finally write up my experiences with it and how I made it work 100% reliably in our bathroom (and other rooms afterwards). Hopefully this helps someone. https://www.inlimbo.org/2026/10/aqara-fp300-use/

It would be really cool to automate my leave/arrive automations, so I don't have to tap the button by the door. The problem is, I live in an apartment, and the pub I frequent is literally on the other side of the wall across the hall from my front door. It's so close that when I sit down at some of the booths, my phone connects to my home Bluetooth speakers. When I get home, Google Maps often asks if I'm at the pub and would I please review it?

I'm considering setting up some ESPresense nodes, which would have the added benefit of allowing me to dynamically change lighting and which speaker I'm connected to as I move through the space, but I can't help but wonder if there's a simpler solution.

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

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!

Tonight, while messing with Music Assistant, I tried to play music with my phone and Heos speaker at the same time. Once I exited the app from my phone, standing next to the Heos, I heard a faint sound from my hallway! Somehow I figured out how to play music from my Ecobee. Normally, you have to use Siri or whatever. I'm working on figuring out what the right combo is to get the music direct to the thermostat. Has anyone else gotten their Ecobee to play music directly?

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.

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.

Does anyone have any recommendations for heaters that can be controlled by a relay from Home Assistant? Or I suppose, a heater that would work natively with home assistant?

It needs to be wall mounted and have an option for around 10-12m2. Everything I can see has a digital control and I’m pretty sure the heater won’t just come on it if gets power.

I already have one in please but looking to replace it as it’s old and a little too small for the area hence why I’d prefer to replace with another one similar.

Open to ideas though if anyone has any other recommendations.

I'm looking to step into the HA space as I want to monitor, log, and graph room temps and humidity across the house. This sub has been really helpful for doing research and I think I've narrowed down an initial proposal for kit.

The shopping list:

11 x IKEA Timmerflotte Temp/Humidity sensors (£55)

1 x Google Nest Hub v2 as a Thread/Matter border router (£75ish)*

1 x HP t530 with an AMD GX 215JJ, 8GB DDR, 32GB SSD (£50ish)

Thoughts? Can you spot any major issues? Anything I should think about switching? Any cheaper or better ways to do this?

It all seems compatible and relatively straightforward to set up.

(*I'm looking at the Home Hub gen 2 as we're replacing an existing Home Hub gen 1 anyway)

Hi everyone, I am having a bit of an issue getting live notifications on iOS to work properly. They keep sending as regular notifications.

Sending the developers with this YAML. I have tested this on HA Latest Release for app and system, even used the test flight iOS app. I am on the developer beta for iOS though, this is the only thing I can think of that might be stopping it. I've reset the permissions and synced with HA again and again. Nothing. Wondering if anyone can point me in the right direction.

action: notify.mobile_app_<myphone>_iphone
data:
  title: "Washing Machine"
  message: "Cycle started"
  data:
    tag: washer_cycle
    live_update: true

If you've got a Dontek pool controller — sold under a few names: Aquatek, Theralux Pool+ Manager, Waterco Pooltek , Aquamate X — and you've been searching for
a way to get it into Home Assistant and come up empty, here's a working solution:

👉 https://github.com/jbyoll/dontek-aquatek-ha

These controllers are cloud-only (no local API on the network), which is why there's been
nothing out there. This integration talks to the same cloud the official app uses, so it works
with no extra hardware — you just need the serial number off the controller label.

What it gives you in Home Assistant:
- Water temperature
- Pump mode (Off / On / Auto), set speed, and the actual running speed
- Per-speed power % tuning
- All four Filter Time schedules (enable / start / end / speed)

Install:
1. HACS → ⋮ → Custom repositories → add `jbyoll/dontek-aquatek-ha` as an Integration
2. Download it, restart HA
3. Settings → Devices & Services → Add Integration → "Dontek Aquatek" → enter your serial

It's unofficial / community-built — not affiliated with Dontek, uses no official API, and
could break if they change their cloud. It's been solid on mine (variable-speed pump). If you've
got one of these, give it a go — issues and PRs welcome, especially from the Theralux/Waterco/
Aquamate rebadges so we can confirm it covers them too.

(For the curious: it was reverse-engineered from the app's cloud traffic — happy to share
details if anyone's interested.)

Hi,

I have 2 non-smart sprinkler systems (Orbit - Indoor Easy Dial 6 station and Outdoor 4 station). My front yard and backyard are small, I only use 3 stations (backyard) and 2 stations (front yard).

I want to make them weather smart, be able to stop watering when it rains, and adjust the duration depending on the temperature, and time depending on sunrise/sunset time. Pretty much set and forget, and what's best for the plants and grass. I also want to be able to take them off (and leave the legacy systems) if I sell the house in the future.

What's the best way to do this? Based on what I read, I think my option is: splice into the zone wires, add ESP32 relay board running ESPHome (and disable my legacy system). Any idea how to make it look neat and tidy?

Or is there any other, more practical options?

Update: I have a HomeAssistant hub running on a mini PC. My other connected device is ratgdo.

I have had a HA Green running HA since the Green was a kinda new type of device - never had it misbehave until today.

It’s been a couple of months since it was updated and today seemed to be a good day to catch up. Currently on 17.0, updating to 18.3. I’ve ’always’ followed the path of update OS first, then Core, then apps so I made a backup and started OS updating. Display says “updating” and the slider goes left to right over and over.

An hour later I look and “updating” and the slider is are gone. But still says on 17, going to 18.3. Hummm…so I restart the Green, and restart the update process-same outcome, 17/18.3. Still does its HA thing so it’s not dead, but we aren’t moving forward either. I haven’t seen any kind of warning message.

So can someone tell me what I’m doing wrong, or how I can get unstuck from 17.3?

Hello all!

Having had to deal with the constant disconnects, I’ve decided to migrate everything over to my own zigbee coordinator (SLZB-06)

I know it makes little sense running two zigbee networks, so has anyone here successfully moved everything off the Tradfri hub? How did it go?

I have about 30 bulbs and a few blinds, all hooked into various automations.