smart home, written and shipped
Hey, I'm Brandon.
I build, break, and write about smart homes.
You can find me as @smarthomesellout on YouTube and Discord, teaching electronics at the Dallas Makerspace, working on products and community at Apollo Automation, and contributing across ESPHome and Home Assistant. I show up where people are trying to figure stuff out, and write down the rest in posts.
curated work
Projects
Apollo MSR-2
Contributions to the Apollo multi-sensor radar (mmWave + air quality) firmware and ESPHome integration.
- ESPHome
- C++
- Home Assistant
GasBuddy for Home Assistant
Maintained Python library, HA integration, and Lovelace card so gas prices and EV charger data show up alongside the rest of your dashboard.
- Python
- TypeScript
- Home Assistant
- Lit
Cozyla wall tablet
Always-on living room display: FK launcher, Home Assistant dashboard, and a Plex-state-aware screensaver swap.
- Home Assistant
- FK launcher
- Posterr
Apollo blueprints
A growing collection of Home Assistant blueprints tuned for Apollo devices and the way I run my own setup.
- Home Assistant
- YAML
Apollo AIR-1
Test fork and contributions to the Apollo AIR-1 firmware.
- ESPHome
- C++
ESPHome
Drive-by contributions to upstream ESPHome.
- Python
- C++
what I use
Setup
Hardware and software I actually run, not a sponsored list. The smart home crowd asks about this stuff a lot, so here it is in one place.
Smart home
Apollo MSR-2, TEMP-1, AIR-1
Day-job products and the multi-sensor backbone at home. mmWave presence, accurate temperature, and air-quality in every key room.
Smart home
Zooz Z-Wave
Rock-solid Z-Wave light switches and smart plugs. The wired-lighting layer that just works, year after year.
Smart home
Philips Hue
The best premium Zigbee bulbs out there for serious color and CCT control. Worth the price if lighting is the room's job.
Smart home
Aqara
Cheap, plentiful Zigbee motion and contact sensors. The "one in every room" tier without the budget pain.
Smart home
Xiaomi LYWSD03MMC
$5 BLE thermometers scattered through the house. Custom firmware lets Home Assistant read them natively over BLE, no hub.
Smart home
Ring keypad v2 + Alarmo
Proper keypad UX bolted onto HA's Alarmo. Real arm/disarm flow without leaving the local-first stack.
Software
Home Assistant
Brain of the house. Local-first, hundreds of automations, no cloud round-trips.
Software
ESPHome
Firmware on every custom sensor and switch I run that isn't off-the-shelf.
Hardware
Unraid
Home server. Self-hosts Plex, Bitwarden, FileBrowser (my own FTP), AdGuard for network-wide ad-blocking, and the rest of the container drawer.
Hardware
Cozyla 32" wall tablet
FK launcher + HA dashboard + Posterr screensaver, swapped automatically by Plex state.
Software
Posterr
Idle screens turn into a Plex movie-poster wall. The best smart home detail in the house.
Workflow
Astro + Bun
This site. Static at the edge on Cloudflare Workers.
Workflow
Claude Code
Pair-programmer for everything I ship lately, including this site.
live from github
Recent repos
GitHub activity is taking a break right now. Catch up on github.com/bharvey88.
latest commits