Smart Home

The plain HTML wall tablets from part 1 learned to listen: the kids' tablets and the family room remote are now voice assistants, have a Music Assistant page, bring up the right page on their own, and update themselves after a change.

How I took a Home Assistant install with 421 automations, a few security holes and a lot of polling, put it in Git, and cleaned it up with Claude Code without breaking anything my family relies on.

The Lovelace dashboards on the wall tablets around my house were slow and kept reloading, so Claude and I replaced them with small HTML and JavaScript pages that talk to Home Assistant over one websocket. Here's what they look like and how they work.

Running XMCOSY+ outdoor string lights fully locally with Local Tuya, template lights and Node-RED, keeping colors, scenes and brightness.

Designing and 3D printing a wall mount for a 2015 Amazon Fire tablet as a Home Assistant dashboard, with the cord hidden in the wall. STL included.

Pairing Zigbee devices caused the ZB-GW03 to reboot under Zigbee2Tasmota. The unofficial tasmota32-zigbeebridge firmware fixes it.

A pair of Tasmota rules that work around the ZB-GW03 failing to reconnect to Home Assistant's ZHA after a power loss.

Using a Flirc USB IR receiver to turn old infrared remotes into Home Assistant controllers via keyboard events.

Playing a door chime through a speaker plugged into the Home Assistant box itself, using the VLC add-on over telnet.

Using a Tasmota Zigbee coordinator directly with Zigbee2Tasmota and MQTT in Home Assistant, instead of ZHA or Zigbee2MQTT.