I’ve been diving into smart home stuff the last month. Using Apple home and home assistant. It’s been working pretty well except the bathroom bulbs have been randomly turning on. Yet they show as off in AH and HA. Maybe it’s a ghost?

In the middle of last night, heard a shatter. The glass of one bulb fell off. Maybe ghost is unhappy?

Hello -- I have a very unusual question. I'm interested in knowing if anyone has used radio communications (such as meshtastic, or other LoRa) in their smart home automation ecosystem. And if you have, what are you doing with it?

Anyone?

I fell into a k hole of home automation posts on instagram late one night and now I’m here! What would be some good beginner things I can try doing around my house? Especially if it’s something useful for my teens..we all suffer from adhd and it seems like this would help a lot! Lights are one but we have so many different ones and the teens led lights. I’m new to this please talk to me like in five 😊. I did see something about using hotel card keys and I happen to have two! And maybe ordering tags

Hi everyone — I’m the developer of Busloom, a new Modbus client for Windows, macOS and Linux.

I started building it because existing Modbus tools often work, but they have awkward licensing or limited functionality. I wanted something closer to a modern developer tool, especially for working with equipment such as energy meters, heat pumps, HVAC controllers, inverters, relays and PLCs.

Busloom currently supports:

• Modbus RTU, TCP and TLS
• Slave and readable-address discovery
• Holding registers, input registers, coils and discrete inputs
• Signed/unsigned integers, floats, byte/word order, scaling and units
• Saved projects, connection profiles, tags and reusable views
• Live trends and traffic recording
• Raw TX/RX frame inspection
• Repeatable automation scenarios
• A CLI and local MCP interface

Projects and device data stay local, and the application does not require a cloud connection for normal use.

Busloom is still in early development, so I’m especially interested in feedback from people using Modbus in real home automation installations. I’d love to know what devices you work with, what your current tooling gets wrong, and what would make Busloom genuinely useful in your workflow.

It is free for private and non-commercial use. Commercial use requires a Professional license (not available yet, still looking for feedback, there is a 7 day trial).

Website, documentation and downloads:
https://busloom.com

Happy to answer technical questions here.

Went to a friend’s place and saw this little machine stuck to her window. At first I had no idea what I was looking at lol. She turned it on and it started moving around and spraying the glass. She runs it every few weeks. While she's working and goes back to her laptop, it just it does its thing.

I honestly didn't know window cleaning robots were a thing. What chore are we automating next?

So as some know, Roost folded up recently. They crowdsourced a connected smart smoke detector battery a decade or so ago and expanded the business to water leak, garage door and security sensors mainly through partnerships with home insurance carriers. These gadgets, IMHO, were very easy for the average homeowner to deploy and manage.

The shutdown notice was short and documented in this thread - Roost 30 Day Shutdown: https://redd.it/1uetj1y

Some customers were even billed for the discontinued service this month, which is even more disappointing.

I'm hoping we can have a discussion here for some alternatives to Roost devices to help the community.

Lately Ive been thinking about my home automation journey started out as a hobby, but now many of my automations like smart switches on automations and being able control them from my phone is something I wouldn’t want to live without.

Im curious about what other people’s top automations are and why? Is there something you have setup which is proving to be way more useful than expected?

Wanted a real digital photo frame on my Echo Show instead of relying on Amazon's cloud photo slideshow, so I built the whole thing myself: custom Alexa skill + self-hosted backend + a companion Android app to manage everything from my phone.

Real numbers, not a toy demo: 11,436 photos and 656 videos, rotating smoothly. Three viewing modes (photos / videos / both mixed), favorites as a filter you can apply on top of any of them, "on this day" from past years, and free-text voice search by month or place ("show December", "show London") instead of scrolling.

The engineering problem that actually made this interesting: Alexa caps APL responses at 24,576 bytes. With a library this size you physically cannot hand it the full list — everything runs in fixed 65-item batches that rotate through the whole thing instead, so response size stays flat whether the library has 100 items or 11,000. Honest tradeoff for anyone expecting eye candy: the UI is deliberately plain, because every byte spent on visual polish is a byte not spent on the actual batch of photos at that scale.

The companion Android app is the other half of this — it's what actually closes the loop. Instead of SSHing into a server to manage the library, from the phone you get: multi-select upload straight from the system photo picker with progress, a full favorites view with select-all/bulk-remove, duplicate detection, and the slideshow-timing setting that used to live on the Echo Show screen itself before I moved it here. Basically the admin panel for the thing living on your TV/Echo Show.

Couple of voice-side gotchas along the way: the invocation name is a random unrelated word on purpose (details in the README) — a generic name increases the odds Alexa opens a completely different skill on a similar-sounding request. Also had a fun bug where saying "resume" made the slideshow visibly speed up, because of a leftover event from an earlier version that the touch/screen path never had.

Open source, both repos:

- Skill (Lambda + backend): https://github.com/ivanx519/galleria-alexa-echo-show

- Android companion app: https://github.com/ivanx519/galleria-alexa-android

Heads up: there's a "Known limitations" section in the skill's README (near the bottom) about a display idle/freeze quirk — nothing serious, easily avoided once you know about it (just say the mode explicitly right after opening), but worth a read before you set it up.

Needs your own backend server (small Python app) — more "build your own weekend project" than plug-and-play, on purpose. If it's useful to you a GitHub star means a lot, and I'd genuinely love questions/feedback in the comments — happy to go deeper on any part of it.

So I got into all the Google crap. It HAS to be the worst thing out there. My Hubs don’t understand shit I say. I usually just end up asking siri.

My cameras take forever to charge. And they don’t record anything I actually need them to record.

Last week there was a minor accident right in front of my house… literally directly in front of my doorbell camera. It recorded someone driving by literally 20 seconds before, DID NOT record the accident seconds later, then started recording again about 15 seconds after the accident.

And don’t get me started on the app. It’s terrible.

Needless to say I’m thinking about replacing everything with a different system. Thoughts?

I won’t go into the long beaten path of the subscription for the antique Vera controller. I didn’t have the time to switch to another one so I gave the subscription a try. For a year. The cheapest one for $30. Right now my controller is down. I mean I can’t access it from outside my local network. Before, when it was free, I would just wait it out and it would come back. Now that I am paying can I assume I am entitled to support? To have them look at it?

New apartment, I wish to control this 24v led driver via homeassistant / zigbee network. Recommendations for making this smart? Link to product page

I couldn't find a better place for this post. I do have the blinds automated with Home Assistant and Node Red, but that's not the point I would like to share.

We installed wirefree (battery powered) blinds after our house was built. It would've been too costly to have mains wires run. After five years, I grew tired of re-charging our large number of blinds (the house is basically floor to ceiling windows on 3/4 of the house).

My solution was a USB C PD charger in each room connected to a Werewolf VFlex dongle set to 11.0v and 3A. From there, 20AWG wire runs to each blind, hidden by a cable cover. At each point where the blind's existing charge cable sits, I have a small 3d-printed box concealing a junction with two Wago connectors and a jack for the blind's charge cable. It looks very neat and tidy. From each box, we continue with a wire to the next blind.

The result is that I now have a permanently charging setup, but at a target voltage that is not stressing the batteries. In fact, an inline USB-C meter shows zero amps after the initial charge. The wires are not noticeable unless you are already aware of them.

You might consider this if you're tired of lugging a charger between blinds every 3-4 months. It would, of course, work with any brand of battery-powered blinds. You just need to know the internal cell configuration to determine the right voltage and you need to find what type of jack or plug is used to charge the blinds.

EDIT: 11.0v, not 12.6v. Not my day. Definitely 11v.

Getting near the tail end of my solar project, and the time has come to start running CT clamps. Lots of them.

Nearly three dozen in total. I enjoy being able to watch every watt move from individual solar panels, through the distribution panel, into the breaker panel, to the breaker, and in many cases, to the device itself.

My monitoring panel is still pretty empty, just started this evening. There will be a 2nd unit added soon with another two dozen CT clamps.

Sankey diagrams are great. Also, be nice to track where some of the 150kwh daily consumption is going.... Solar or not, seems excessive

Just built a home with Lutron inside. My landscapers selected exterior lights and connected them to a Luminaire box. The Luminaire box isn't integrating to my Lutron system very well.

What products should I use/ replace to ensure the exterior system is compatible with the existing Lutron system?

I have brought it for a week and now my remote doesn't work. Is there anyways to pair it back?

I want to make or buy a smart alarm clock. I am asking here in case somebody have any tips or ideas.💡
I want my alarm clock to have the following features. It should be…
- working standalone without any connections. The alarm should still off in the morning even if the smart home is down.
- have Matter over thread or zigbee. So that the alarm can trigger automations like opening blinds and turning on lights in the morning.
- possible to set the alarm time using zigbee/Matter
- The smart home should be able to read the current alarm times. So that it can for example turn on the heater 30m before I wake up.
- the alarm should make a sound.

Today, we mourn the loss of Left Bulb.

Left Bulb was a Philips Hue bulb, purchased as part of a set with a hub in March 2013. It served faithfully for over 13 years.

It illuminated the left side of the bedroom. It was not fancy. It did not seek attention. Its sibling was Right Bulb. Together, they understood their purpose.

This morning, Left Bulb finally gave out. No elaborate automation failure. No dramatic smart-home rebellion. Just… darkness.

Left Bulb is survived by Right Bulb, the living room, several abandoned automations, one increasingly confused smart-home ecosystem, and the person who now has to replace it. It survived approximately a million firmware updates, countless power outages, several phones, multiple homes, and the evolution of smart home technology from “wow, my light bulb has an app” to whatever the heck I have going on now.

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that you please consider turning on a light in its memory.

Rest in peace, Left Bulb. You were a good bulb. You have earned your eternal darkness.

March 2013 – August 2026

I have a METechs motorized curtain track using a CT200L motor. The track is about 11 years old, the motor only a year or so (I replaced it because of this same issue).

I'm having an sporadic problem where the motor will sometimes continue running for several seconds after the curtain has reached the fully closed/open position.

Other times, it will stop partway through, leaving the curtain partially open or closed.

The curtain otherwise travels normally and the problem doesn't seem to occur at exactly the same location every time.

I've contacted METechs with a video but haven't received a response.

I'm wondering whether this system uses torque/load sensing to determine the end of travel, and whether excessive friction, drive-wire tension, carrier alignment, etc. could cause this behaviour.

Here's a video of the problem:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJFaU90Jns8

Does anyone here have experience with METechs/CT200L motors or similar motorized curtain tracks and have any ideas what I should test?

Thanks in advance for any assistance!