Home Automation

Home Assistant’s built-in history graph and gauge cards get the job done, but they’re fairly plain. Mini Graph Card by kalkih is one of those HACS cards that immediately makes your dashboard look like something you’d actually want to show people - dynamic colour thresholds, dual Y-axes, configurable aggregation, and a clean minimal design. In this post I’ll walk through installing it via HACS, then build up a card that shows SwitchBot temperature and humidity data with colour-coded thresholds and both sensors on the same tile. If you’ve not yet got your SwitchBot sensors talking to Home Assistant, start with my earlier post on ESPHome Bluetooth proxies - that covers the sensor setup end to end. ...

Setting Up a SwitchBot BLE Thermo-Hygrometer in Home Assistant with ESPHome bluetooth_proxy In this blog post, I’ll walk you through how I set up a SwitchBot BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) Indoor/Outdoor Thermo-Hygrometer in Home Assistant (HA) using an ESP32 running ESPHome as a Bluetooth proxy. If you’re working with Home Assistant in a containerized environment (as I am), you might face challenges with Bluetooth connectivity, in particular, passing through a bluetooth adapter. This approach solves that elegantly and opens the door to other Bluetooth-based projects by providing extended bluetooth connectivity over a WiFi backbone. ...

Let’s face it, cats are demanding creatures. They expect their food to be served on time, and they’re not afraid to let you know when it’s late. But what if you trigger the feeding action to our Home Assistant dashboard? In this post, we’ll explore how to use Home Assistant to control a Tuya-compatible cat feeder, ensuring your feline friend never goes hungry. Get ready to unleash the power of automation and give your cat the royal treatment they deserve! ...

I have covered Home Assistant (HA) content a number of times in previous posts, and am I a strong advocate for this project. The home automation scene is a wash with consumer offerings, but no single silicone valley big hitter has managed to provide a fully interoperable solution; most certainly not an affordable one. Ultimately, everyone has there own idea of how home automation should work. Home Assistant doesn’t solve the problem of standards dilution, but it offers an extremely robust way to tie the wide variety of standards and products together. ...