Home-Automation

With a baby in the house, the question at bedtime is always the same: which sleeping bag, and what goes under it? The usual answer is a room thermometer and a tog chart, which means reading one, then looking up the other, often in the dark. Home Assistant already had a temperature sensor in every room, so I got it to do the lookup. The result is one card per room. It shows the temperature, a sleeping bag in the band’s colour with its tog on it, the clothes to put underneath, and a status line saying whether the room is in the safe range. It’s a single button-card template, so the temperature bands are defined once and every room uses them. ...

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. ...

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. ...

Updated October 2026: added the direct answer, a terminal table, the neutral question, switch types and pairing, a troubleshooting section and the agent handoff block. The video and the original diagram are unchanged. The Sonoff ZBMINIL2 (Amazon) is a Zigbee relay that fits behind a UK light switch and needs no neutral at the switch. Wire it in series with the switched live and connect the existing rocker switch to S1 and S2, and the light works from the wall switch, from Home Assistant, or both. The whole job is four terminals, and the only trap is that the blue wire in the switch drop is a live, not a neutral. ...

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. ...

They say that the long tail page titles are best for SEO, well this one certainly should be up there with the best of them. In this post, I am going to explain how easy it is to control Kasa a HS100 / HS110 with IFTTT and python webhooks. Using this basic code, you expand into building a very powerful home automation system which fits your needs and take your Kasa home automation to the next level. ...