home assistant

My bathroom fan kept starting when nobody was showering, and my bedroom night mode kept switching itself off at 2 am. I stopped guessing, exported Home Assistant's history and replayed it against the rules, with Claude writing the replay scripts. Here's how that works and what the numbers said.

The family room tablet learned to show what matters right now: one banner for everything that needs attention, a swipe to peek at what's hidden, and a thermostat card that also controls the attic AC and the basement heater.

I trained a small YOLOv5 model on photos from my alley camera so Home Assistant can tell my three cars apart, and so my phone can say whether the parking spot behind the house is free before I get home.

Four years after getting my XMCOSY+ string lights running locally with LocalTuya, the Node-RED flow is gone, the light speaks kelvin again, and the whole thing fits in one Home Assistant package you can drop into your own config.

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.

Replacing a discontinued Logitech Harmony with a cheap Bluetooth remote, a Python event listener, and Home Assistant automations, with no cloud involved.

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.

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.