home assistant

My beginner Home Assistant class is up on YouTube

I taught my free Intro to Home Assistant class at the Dallas Makerspace on September 12, and the full recording is on YouTube now. The morning of the class I cut the live demo and taught it with the hardware in my hands instead. The outline, handout, and print files are free to reuse.

Turning a HUB75 Matrix into a Gameday Scoreboard

NFL kickoff week seemed like the right time to make my HUB75 matrix show live scores. One Saturday, 21 blueprint versions, and a lot of standing in the living room saying "run it again" later, my wall shows the game, my lights celebrate touchdowns, and switching teams is a dropdown instead of a reflash.

Reverse engineering a PixMob RF LED wristband to work with ESPHome

PixMob wristbands are the LED bands they hand out at concerts and games. I got the RF version working from ESPHome, packaged it as an external component, and documented it properly. The band now shows up in Home Assistant as a normal RGB light, and setting one up takes three blocks of YAML.

Upgrading the RTTTL play_buzzer action on my day off

A customer asked why our MTR-1 didn't have a nice RTTTL action like SMLIGHT's coordinators. We had the action all along, but the form for it in Home Assistant was a blank box, because the ESPHome API can't send a description. Two days later there are six PRs across three repos and the buzzer plays melodies from prefilled fields.

What I learned letting Claude edit a YouTube Short

I wanted a 37 second video of my doorbell playing the Pink Panther theme, and I didn't want to edit it. So I had Claude cut the whole thing in ffmpeg. It got there, eventually, after being confidently wrong about the same problem four times in a row and me refusing to accept it.

Getting the CAST-1 wiki ready before launch

The CAST-1 plugs into the line-in on speakers you already own and turns them into a Music Assistant player. It launches in about a month, so I spent a day finishing its wiki. Along the way I found a sensor listed in our own docs that no firmware has ever exposed.

I stopped leaving the TV on for an empty house

My leaving-the-house automation used to only lock the door and arm the alarm, so anything playing kept playing to an empty room. Now it powers off the TVs, pauses the speakers, and offers a one-tap resume when I get back. Getting Plex to come back where I left off is where most of the wrong turns were.

Cooling the rooms my central air can't keep up with

Comfort Masters quoted me $24,000 to fix the way my house cools. I passed for now, kept my central air, and added three Midea portable units, around $400 each, to pick up the slack in the rooms it can't keep cold. Home Assistant runs them: a fan-speed deadband, a 20-amp breaker interlock, on-demand network-closet cooling, and a Mr. Freeze button for movie nights.

Building an air quality LED indicator for the AIR-1

The AIR-1 has three onboard RGB LEDs, so I made them show air quality at a glance. The feature itself is small. Getting there took longer than it should have, because I kept fixing things that weren't the problem. These are the dead ends and where it ended up.

Two days of ceiling dust, measured in eight rooms

I spent two days cutting sheetrock, disturbing old insulation, and scraping popcorn ceiling in the upstairs bathroom, with eight Apollo AIR-1 sensors watching the whole house. The two rooms off the bathroom spiked 20 to 30 times over, and the return air lifted every other room too. The room-by-room data, and why I wore a P100 the whole time.

Dehumidifier tank-full notifications with a Zooz ZEN15

My dehumidifier is a completely dumb appliance, but it sends me a notification the moment its tank fills up. No smart features, no app, no subscription. Just a heavy-duty Z-Wave plug that watches power draw and one Home Assistant automation that fires when the power falls off a cliff.

Two Home Assistant UI tweaks for power users

A recent r/homeassistant thread asked how to get the UI closer to the more advanced, power-user feel it used to have. The comments had a pile of ideas. Two of them stuck with me, and both take about ten seconds to flip on.

IKEA KAJPLATS: Matter was a mess, so mine run Zigbee

IKEA replaced the TRÅDFRI line with KAJPLATS, and the new bulbs ship with Matter over Thread. I gave that a real shot and it was a mess. I ended up adding mine to my existing Zigbee2MQTT mesh instead, using the hidden 12-power-cycle sequence that switches the bulb into Zigbee pairing mode.

I cut my Home Assistant backups in half

My backups had ballooned, and the recorder database was the reason. I'd had exclude filters in my config for ages and they did basically nothing, because excludes only stop new data, they don't touch what's already there. Here's the cleanup that actually shrank the database, and the backups along with it.

I made a free smart home class. Steal it.

My beginner Home Assistant class is now at classes.smarthomesellout.com. If you teach too, the repo is set up so you can fork it, swap in your own gear and stories, and use it for your own class.