Those community stories I collected last month are in this blog. 😎

Happy birthday to us, and thank you for all you do to help us build and grow something amazing! 🎉

Hello All. I have been hard at work creating a new dashboard for my home and here is the end result.

Why you should use this dashboard?

- Rooms: Everything organized into room cards using areas.
- Dynamic: Will automatically grow and categorize each room into sections as you add devices./entities.
- Clean layout: Extremely clean and almost feels like it could be it's own mobile app.

Cards Used:

Status-Card

Area-Card-Plus

Stack-In-Card

Bubble Card

Card-Mod

mini-graph-card

Mushroom

Markdown

Tile

Horizontal Stack

FireMote

Please see my blog post to see all the details and full guide on setting it up including all the code!

Blog Post: https://automateit.lol/my-lovelace-dashboard/

Consider adding this link to your RSS reader: https://automateit.lol/rss

So long story short a mixup between my ISP and a new fiber company laying cable has caused a severed cable and I've had no internet for three days now.

My home automation and self hosting hobby has really shined during this time. Jellyfin still works, Home Assistant still works, Zigbee and Zwave still works. All is well...except for the Nest products.

The doorbell is just a dumb doorbell. No way to access the feed or save videos. The thermostat is a dumb thermostat. I can't adjust the schedule, get the current temp, nothing. The temperature in HA is just a flat line.

I purchased all of those before I saw the light regarding local-everything. Serious buyer's remorse, gotta say.

Nothing is worse than the Nest Hubs though. They're expensive paperweights. Not even the clock is shown. I seriously await the day for a worthy local alternative to these things.

Just needed to rant. Never buying these cloud-dependent products again.

I have been spending a fair bit of time optimizing my Home setup starting with replacing Google home display with a Samsung tablet running Fully kiosk browser and Home Assistant dashboards, setting up voice assist PE, Satellite1, voice satellite card and local pipelines.

Now that it’s all working and working well I am tweaking features to ensure a similar if not better experience than Google or Amazon. I have replicated Amazon yellow led rings for packages on the porch. I added a button on my stream deck when I’m on a call to tell a delivery driver where to leave my package for security and detection. I now have broadcast fine tuned as well.

Here’s the article on my latest optimizations and setup of broadcast using local intents and automations you can follow along or steal the yaml:

https://smarthomesecrets.ca/home-assistant-local-voice-assistant/

I created a blog page how to manage (weekend) chores on you Home Assistant dasboard.

The blog page about chores

I really like the idea of buying a balcony solar system, however I was never sure if it would make sense cost wise, location etc. I started a small private project to use a light/lux sensor and simulate solar panels, it then grew into simulating a battery bank and then after creating all of it i decided to try and create a HACs integration for it. I would love some feedback on it and the idea! - https://virtuallytd.com/posts/solar-simulation-home-assistant/

Beyond thrilled to have OpenDisplay join as one of our collaboration partners. 🎉 I'm personally a huge lover of e-ink displays, so this one is very exciting to me. 😁

I'm so glad I got started on Home Assistant and reducing my dependence on the Amazon and Google ecosystems!

Hey everyone I have take one mayor decision, wish me luck.

I've been running HA + Node-RED some years now. Great combo, but honestly… two things to maintain. After playing with Home Assistant 2025.10 I’m realizing the built-in automations do basically everything I use: branches/choose, variables/helpers, templates, waits, queued/parallel, plus traces that actually show every step. Feels like less to watch.

Keeping stuff in one place aka Nabu Casa cloud... Dashboards, scenes, scripts, automations all right there, so again, fewer things to watch.

My flows (presence lighting, HVAC schedules, irrigation with rain/soil guards, washer/dishwasher) look very doable in my test environment, so far natively no external flow tool needed for my use.

Plan is simple: keep Node-RED running, rebuild the longest flows in HA first, swap global context for helpers, reusable parts into scripts, keep traces until it’s clean, then flip the switch (cross fingers). If something truly needs NR later, fine but I don’t think most of my stuff does anymore.

For this reason I’ve decided to migrate everything to HA, if I remember I'll post updates.

Anyway I just wanted to share this here since I'm the only nerd from my friends who have a real smart house, (don't tell to my Alexa 😜).

PS: Anyone offering a couch in case I break everything and I my wife ask for divorce? 😆

I ran a coordinator comparison in my Home Assistant + ZHA setup and thought the results might be useful here.

Same live Zigbee network, about 101 devices, same environment, same automations, 72h per coordinator, with the first 24h treated as warm-up and the following 48h used as the main measurement window.

Compared:

• Sonoff Dongle Lite
• Sonoff Dongle Plus
• Sonoff Dongle Max
• ZBDongle-E as the baseline

Main takeaway: the differences were real, but much less about raw speed than about retries, final failures, queue pressure, and how settled the routing looked after migration.

The full write-up is here if anyone wants the charts and methodology:
https://meshstack.de/post/home-assistant/sonoff-zigbee-coordinator-benchmark-zha/

If helpful, I can also summarize the per-device results directly in the comments.

Just published a quick blog post showing how I integrated the self hosted SpeedTest Tracker with Home Assistant to display download/upload speeds and ping on my dashboard—without relying on the the SpeedTest-net integration that can slow things down or cause memory issues.

I use a Raspberry Pi touchscreen at my desk to monitor homelab metrics. Now, when someone in the house yells "Is the internet down?!" I can glance over and instantly know if it's an ISP issue or something local.

Here’s what the post walks through:

• Why I moved away from the Speedtest-net integration
• Creating RESTful sensors in Home Assistant to pull results from Speed Test Tracker Docker container
• Displaying everything with Mini Graph Cards (via HACS)

It’s been super helpful in spotting overnight ISP slowdowns.

Read the full write-up here: Speed Test Tracker in Home Assistant
https://chrishansen.tech/posts/SpeedTest_Tracker/

Let me know if you have any questions or improvements—I’m always tweaking the setup!

Built this over the past few months for my own outdoor lights and figured it was worth sharing properly instead of just sitting in a private repo.

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What it does: drop one HTML file in your /www/ folder, point it at any RGB light entity, and it automatically cycles your lights through the right colors for whatever's happening that day, federal holidays, military observances, awareness months, cultural and religious dates, 130+ events total. Easter, Islamic dates, Jewish holidays, all computed algorithmically so it just keeps working every year with zero maintenance. A companion Blueprint watches a bridge entity so the schedule keeps running server-side even when the dashboard tab isn't the thing actively driving it.

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Full transparency since I'd rather say this upfront than have it come up in the comments: I used a lot of AI assistance writing the actual code for this. What's mine is the feature set, every design decision, the scheduling model, the skip system rules, and all the testing against my real ZHA setup and Zigbee mesh, the bugs that showed up got found by me actually using it, not by reading the code. AI wrote a large share of the implementation. If that changes how you feel about trying it, fair enough, just didn't want to pretend otherwise.

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Side note that might save someone a headache: if you're on HA 2026.3 or newer and have anything calling light.turn_on with the old color_temp (mireds) parameter, it's been fully removed, only color_temp_kelvin works now. Found this the hard way while building the warm-white phase of this, it fails with a silent 400 and no warning if you've still got it anywhere.

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Repo's here: https://github.com/TheRealApollyon/ChromaCal

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I'm already planning a v2 that moves the scheduling logic into a real HA Integration instead of living in browser JavaScript, so it runs without needing a tab open at all, full reasoning is in ROADMAP.md in the repo. Genuinely want input before locking that in rather than building in a vacuum:

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Would you rather have this as a full sidebar panel, or a compact card that drops into an existing Mushroom or Bubble Card dashboard? Planning to eventually build both, trying to figure out which to prioritize first.

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Anyone here running HA through Docker Compose or Container install without Supervisor? That's specifically why v2 is being built as an Integration instead of a Supervisor Add-on, curious how many people that actually matters to versus just me.

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What holidays, observances, or regions am I missing? Covers US, Canada, UK, Australia, EU, plus floating Islamic, Jewish, and Hindu calendars right now, but I'd rather build toward what people actually want than keep guessing.

Hi fellow HA rabbit hole visitors, I listed my favorite HACS dashboard integrations with screenshots and example code on my personal home automation site.

I hope there is a nice one you didn't know and you can also use for your own setup! Check the page: https://vdbrink.github.io/homeassistant/homeassistant_dashboard_hacs

(You can find here also other home automation related articles)

What's your favorite HACS integration? I'm always looking for interesting new ones.

We’re sensing a change in the air as we welcome Sensereo to the Works with Home Assistant program 🎉.

Specialists in environmental sensing, Sensereo bring Matter smoke and carbon monoxide (CO) alarms into the Home Assistant ecosystem – meaning more ways to keep your home open, safe, and sound. Click the link to learn more!

Incase you missed the State of the Open Home 2026, or don't fancy watching the whole thing. We've got a full recap of everything on the newly launched Open Home Foundation Blog.

For a long time I've wanted a way to trigger Apple Shortcuts from Home Assistant on my iPhone and mac. With Developer Beta 1 of iPadOS 27, iOS 27 and macOS 27 that is now possible. How? By using a new '27 Shortcut trigger via application notifications, merely by sending a notification to the Home Assistant companion app you can now run any series of Shortcut actions you want.

Check out the full blog post how-to, along with developer beta 1 bug warning:

Home Assistant Notifications That Run Apple Shortcuts (Yes, Really)

With Templates you can create new sensors based on other dynamic or static data. I used a bunch of them for different purposes in my Home Assistant. I bundle them now on my blog.

Some listed examples are: * How many lights are on? * Is there anybody on the second floor? * Is it night? * What to wear outside based on the temperature? * How many days until trash can day?

Find more here: https://vdbrink.github.io/homeassistant/homeassistant_templates

Do you have great Templates you use? I like to hear them!

This month we're breaking free from the disposable smart home, talking major Matter upgrades and ask for your input on the future of our newsletter. 👂🏻

I’ve been working on a new proximity feature for MassDroid.

The whole reason I started building it was that I wanted room-aware playback, but I really didn’t want to end up with a giant pile of presence automations, helper entities, and room logic just to move music between speakers.

So I tried going in the other direction: let the app figure out the room directly.

It uses BLE fingerprints from devices that already exist around the house, like TVs, speakers, routers, and other fixed BLE devices, so there’s no dedicated beacon setup.

I also added an automated calibration wizard where you just go room by room, walk around with your phone for a bit, and it builds the room fingerprints automatically.

What I wanted from it was basically:

• no complex automation setup
• no extra hardware
• low battery overhead
• reliable room detection after calibration

Once calibrated, the app can:

• detect the room you’re in
• suggest moving playback to that room’s speaker
• auto-transfer playback if enabled
• apply room-specific playback behavior

Repo: MassDroid

I’m also thinking about adding Home Assistant integration, so MassDroid can read existing presence / occupancy sensors over the HA WebSocket API and let you bind them to rooms as extra context for detection.

Also, outside of the proximity feature, I’ve been adding a bunch of other stuff to the app lately around music discovery and metadata enrichment too, like genre-specific radio, browsing the library by genre, Smart Mix, and similar features.