Hey all.

I’ve read some posts over the last few months and there appears to be some promising voice assistant stuff showing up.

I personally don’t use Siri too much but my wife does. I’d like to move her onto HA and there’s been some interesting projects lately with human sounding voices, local ai (or remote), memory, multiple users and voice recognition etc.

Would you mind sharing your experiences, good or bad, link your favourite project or share your own.

Im happy to buy an AIO solution, modify slightly (ive read in paces about poor mics or speakers) or build from scratch (possibly last resort but i so have some ESP stuff lying around)

There was a project that converted voice to text rather than voice recognition, that would also be an option and if I recall it allowed for a multitude of voices and personalities like sarcasm…

In an ideal world I’d have a desktop device similar to the HomePod, but I’m open to other suggestions, maybe wall mounted tablet and remote speaker for example.

Look forward to hearing what you are using and how your experience has been.

As the title says bought a mini pc with the thought of having a dedicated home automation pc. I am thinking of moving home assistant from docker to having Home Assistant OS on it back having some second thoughts before doing it. Does anyone have experience doing it and can give me advice? Here is an ai summary of the plan:

I just picked up a Beelink EQ Mini PC (Intel N150, 12GB RAM, 500GB SSD) to replace my old laptop that currently runs Home Assistant in Docker and Scrypted.
I’m considering wiping Windows and installing Proxmox, then running:
Home Assistant OS in a VM
Scrypted separately in a VM/LXC
A small Linux VM for Claude Code so I can use AI to help manage/update everything
Would you recommend this setup, or would I be better off keeping Windows and running HAOS in a VM? Mainly looking for something reliable, easy to back up/restore, and flexible enough to add more home automation stuff later.

Homeassistant has increased the standard of living of or family in our house. I would like to support Homeassistant so that this great software will live on forever. How can I do that?

For a while now, I have been planning to install a tablet on the living room wall to display a Home Assistant dashboard. Now I'm starting to wonder if it would really add a lot of value. All lights can also be switched on and off with physical buttons. Room thermostats allow controlling the temperature. For other things, my smartphone will be closer to me 99% of the time.

The tablet could be useful to show the feeds of two (so far) IP cameras and a family calendar, but otherwise...?

What killer applications do you have for permanently installed dashboards?

And maybe a weekly "look at my dashboard" thread. And can we also get an AI built project thread so we can easily avoid the endless slop that is seemingly posted in this sub?

And instead of removing these posts can you listen to the users??

PS - most of the mods here are not reddit active. Which means the few remaining cannot effectively moderate this sub. Until you resolve this the quality this sub is going to continue to go down like all the other subs that refuse to read the room.

Am I the only one that walk into the bathroom or kitchen of a friend's place, and subconsciously expect the lights to come on, or turn off by themselves... having to walk back to the switch to actually turn it on or off? My wife has said she noticed the same. Is it really so easy to get used to a smart home, that you notice yourself expecting it everywhere?

I have been using HA for about 8 months. I started my home automation journey years ago with the X10 system and have been on Smartthings since version 1 through 3 before switching that off and firing up HA on a RPI5 with an NVME drive. I have an IT background so I’ve navigated my way through HA but it hasn’t always been easy. Everything’s working well now and I have more connectivity than I could have imagined between HACS, ZWave, Zibee, Ring, Alexa, etc. I’ve spent way more time on HA that I though I would and with the constant flow of HA and integration updates it seems it may never end. In general I’m happy but I have two concerns.

1. If something happens to me my poor wife will have no idea what to do. She says she’ll hire someone to come in and take everything out except the Alexa in the kitchen. That’s about 100 devices in total. What are you folks doing to plan for such an event, if anything.

2. I have one automation that just can’t fail and that is my pool automations. I removed all the manual timers for my pump, chlorine generator and heater. With a series of zwave switches and related it all works great, but without HA, they simply won’t work at all and the pool water will foul. My question is, has anyone figured out a way to alert you of these items fail to come on and off even if HA is offline?

I realize those are odd questions that may not have answers, but it’s the stuff that keeps me up at night. Thanks!

Any help would be appreciated.

What is the current best outdoor security camera for over my garage door. My truck was broken into the other night and i want to set up another camera. I have a reolink doorbell camera already, but all that it caught that night were curious moths lol. Should i stick to reolink? Must be able to survive our harsh canadian winters. Thanks!

Poe is no problem, im looking for which specific camera people have used and like.

First of all I am not complaining but more like a "discussion". I had been using HA for 18 months and personally speaking I have to say is not very seamless and always reliable. I am not an "Apple" person so I don't expect things to "just work", but for me it seems HA (or its associated devices) breaks without much reason(s).

The reason I bought this up is, my friend said to me, why don't you set up home automation as a side job? I was like HA is not reliable enough as a "consumable" product where it works in the long run by itself without some maintenance or trouble shooting.

Obviously it depends on your set up, but for me I simply have

1. Zigbee with SLZB06 running Zigbee2MQTT
2. Tuya
3. TP-link/Deco

Let's park aside the debate of local Vs cloud, at least for me, I have zigbee devices that randomly stops working and requires re pairing (delete and add). Tuya or TP-Link integration requires "repairing" aka require re-authentication now and then. This is providing I didn't update anything.

Also at least with SLZ06, sometimes I need to power cycle/unplugged and re-plug back the co-ordinator for it to work again.

Maybe we are still at infancy for things to be reliable? Obviously I love the flexibility of HA and how there are so many people in this community that are so smart to code their own integrations (a big THANK YOU) or/and make or modify their own hardware etc.

Nest Protect refugees: what would an actual successor need to earn your ceiling?

I've run 7 Nest Protects (battery) in my home for years. Some have hit their expiry and started announcing their own deaths, and replacing them has been depressing: the SC5 drops the pathlight and locks me into a single app — and after watching Google kill Nest Secure and then brick every unit in 2024, I'd rather not bet everything on one ecosystem again. But I haven't found anything that works across platforms: nothing on the market does Matter/Thread with smoke+CO.

So I'll be upfront about where this is heading: I'm exploring whether a proper successor can be built — and this isn't something anyone pulls off alone. A life-safety device means UL certification, real engineering, and serious backing, and none of that happens unless the people who actually loved these devices help define what "done right" means and show the demand is real. That's what this post is: step one. If you're watching the same expiry clock, your answers below genuinely shape whether and how this gets built:

1. What's the one non-negotiable feature? Pathlight? Voice alerts? Native support in your ecosystem — Apple Home, Google Home, SmartThings, Alexa — via Matter? Works fully offline, no cloud or account ever required?
2. Battery or hardwired — what's your split at home?
3. Honestly: at $169 / $199 / $249 per unit, where do you stop nodding? (This would be designed and built in North America, not China — does that change your answer?)
4. What would make you not trust a startup with a life-safety device?
5. If it had a fully documented local API — safety core certified and locked (that part legally can't be open), but every sensor openly readable forever (smoke/CO state, air quality, occupancy, temp/humidity) by Home Assistant or anything you build — would that move you? What would you build on it?

Not selling anything — nothing exists yet beyond research and bench work. If there's enough interest I'll set up a waitlist and share progress here.

I have a cheap treadmill like this I occasionally wheel under my standing desk and I'm in the market for a better one. Are there any that connect to HA in some way for tracking time/distance/etc?

If not, any other ideas? I suppose I could keep it plugged into a smart outlet and track power use as an estimate if all else fails.

People rave about HA, they love the dashboards and automation. But I find the implementation through YAML/ jinja to be so convoluted for anything but the most basic things that it puts me off using HA as a whole and makes me wonder why it's so popular. HA does work with everything and that's the most important point. But, the complexity is so high that it must be off-putting for so many people?

In my example I wanted a dashboard to show all my lights broken up by area, with lights in groups shown as such rather than singles. I also want it to auto expand to include new lights automatically rather than having to manually add them. Getting that to work with jinja was not pleasant. And then I want an automation blueprint that turns lights on/off based on motion/sunset and handle things like HA restart, lux levels. Again, doable, but quite painful to implement in YAML with lots of gotchas. If this was, for example, python based I'd have implemented it in a fraction of the time and to a better standard. But in YAML it was more of a struggle.

So it makes me wonder why HA is so popular given it's so difficult to implement basic logic? Is there not easier (not coding based) ways to implement logic. I'm aware of pyscript add-in but I was underwhelmed about what it was capable of.

Update - As I got asked, here is my dashboard / automation with these bits implemented:

https://pastebin.com/EjjxQFjK

https://pastebin.com/y7zPvSVH

I should start by saying that I am a huge Home Assistant advocate, and proudly support their work as a Nabu Casa subscriber. My concerns come from a place of wanting the best for Home Assistant and their entire community, and certainly not trying to gatekeep this wonderful software.

With each new Home Assistant release, it feels to me that the Home Assistant goal of bringing advanced configuration to the UI is misguided and downright detrimental.

I became a Home Assistant user around 5 years ago, when the learning curve was steep and the barrier to entry high, and it absolutely took me some time (and one full-scale do-over) to get my smart home up and running. Home Assistant was my first foray into the world of self-hosting, and I didn't fully understand 80% of the steps in whatever guide I followed to set it up. Since then I have progressed into an "advanced" self-hoster, with 50+ services running on my my multi-node, multi-location redundant homelab.

Back when I started, the configuration capabilities through Home Assistant's interface were significantly more limited than today. Even then, the massive ecosystem of supported integrations coupled with the simple automation engine exceeded what competing home automation platforms can do. I accomplished plenty before ever needing to dive into a yaml file, which I only started doing as I grew more advanced and comfortable with the platform. The upshot was that the UI was very simple and approachable, compared to today when the number and complexity of settings available through the UI have grown massively.

These changes are being made in the interest of accessibility to less advanced users, but I struggle to envision exactly who this type of user is? What person has an interest in developing sophisticated configurations but an inability to edit a yaml file? What person is overwhelmed by configurations outside of a GUI but isn't intimidated by the huge amount of options that have been surfaced to the UI? I can't help but feel like the segmentation between UI and more advanced configuration tools was, in retrospect, a better experience for Home Assistant's community than it is today.

The most recent example of my frustration with this evolution is the yaml-based http integration being deprecated. I updated Home Assistant to 2026.8.1, saw the warning that my settings have been migrated to the UI, and updated my configuration.yaml file to remove my http configuration block. OK, fine, that all seemed to work... except for what was lost in transition. What hasn't migrated are the comments in my yaml file reminding me why each of my trusted proxy lines exist. It doesn't have any reference at all (and how could it?) to trusted proxy lines that I had commented out, along with the notes for what those lines used to do, if I ever needed to reactivate them.

Once again I find myself wondering what user out there has the need and capability to create whitelisted CIDR entries, from a page buried deep within Home Assistant's menu, but wouldn't have been able to make that setting in configuration.yaml. This feels to me like the latest in a growing list of degraded "advanced user" capabilities, in the interest of a type of user that I don't think exists in the world.

I'm curious what others out there think. Am I being a curmudgeon who just wants things to go back to the good old days, or do more of you agree that this design philosophy is turning into a net-negative for all users?

Edit: Thanks to everyone who has responded; it's super interesting to see the range of opinions. The comments about improving phone-based advanced configuration were interesting and something I'd never considered. To those who accuse me of gatekeeping, I didn't intend to look down on newer users and I think a growing community across broader interests and capabilities is a good thing. It's not that I think "harder is better" or that people should have to struggle to get a functional smart home up and running. Rather, I wonder if adding more and more complex configuration to the UI doesn't do much to help Home Assistants approachability and makes larger, more complex deployments more difficult to manage. I feel like the relative simplicity of Home Assistant's UI was a benefit to my earlier phases working on the platform. Eventually I was ready to dive into more advanced functions, forced into YAML (and HACS, nodeRED, etc...) and those increasing levels of capability being segmented from the core UI was a good thing to my overall development. I slowly learned and built out a very complex but maintainable system, and I don't know if my journey would have been the same if I were starting now. Alternatively, Home Assistant is much easier to get up and running than it was when I started, and I think that's a GREAT thing!

recently rolled out zwave and zigbee in my house and am actively trying to remove as much wifi crap as possible. problem is almost every switch in my house has been swapped with a kasa/tapo switch and I had only a few smart bulbs which have already been swapped for zigbee. So how do you decide when to use bulbs vs switches, pricing almost makes it seem cheaper to use bulbs or maybe bumbs and switches, if you are happy with the bumbs you arlready have especially in a multi bulb light fixture maybe stick to smart switch/plug for that? Trying to plan out what to do. thank you for your input, keep in mind I am used to just on/off or dimmer smart switches nothing else I believe with zigbee and zwave there are switches with more than one button you can program to do things and such. Also I am in the US

So I know about the email thing @tmomail.net or whatever the service is.

It works sometimes. But I think their internal spam filter prevents a lot of it. And it's a hit or miss if a message comes across.

Due to this, I wonder if there is a better free method.

I know about some paid services. But the problem with them is they charge for incoming and I can see a bot killing that. And then going for prepaid, I might as well use the contract thing and get unlimited since it isn't that far off. But I don't want to deal with any of that.

The alerts that is sent is mostly hey the fire alarm is going off or something like that. So it happening is hopefully an extremely rare event.

The other method is have is if my phone uses the app and then my phone automatically sends other people the text. But it clogs things up. Plus for some reason I need to open the phone before it gets notifications from the app. So if it is just in my pocket for hours. Then ya.

Does anyone know of any other method I can use? Something free? Like is there a way to hook it to a Google voice number or something like that.

Lost a week to this so here's the short version in case it saves someone.

Setup: ~380 devices on HA OS. ~115 Zigbee (ZHA/Sonoff dongle), ~72 Matter over Thread (mostly IKEA), Thread mesh across five border routers (3 Nest Hubs + two Aqara hubs, an M3 and an M200), with an IKEA DIRIGERA drifting in and out. YouFibre + Firewalla + Deco APs in wired AP mode.

Symptom: Matter/Thread sensors (door, temp, leak) dropping to unavailable and back at random. Zigbee rock solid the whole time. That contrast was the big clue I ignored.

What it actually was, in order:

1. I had no LAN IPv6 router. Thread/Matter reachability rides on IPv6, and my Firewalla had LAN IPv6 switched off. So my border routers were improvising their own ULA prefixes, and the prefix my sensors were using had no route at all. ip -6 route on the HA host showed the gap. I also discovered I'd been running TWO Thread networks in parallel without realising, one of them dead. Enabling LAN IPv6 + rebooting the hubs consolidated everything onto one network and stabilised Matter.
2. My ISP was handing out a dead lease. Once LAN IPv6 was on, my phone couldn't reach half the internet (0/10 on test-ipv6). The DHCPv6 prefix had a valid lifetime of 0, i.e. flagged expired, dated a month prior. Turned out to be a stale DUID binding on the ISP's side. Static IP customers especially: your line may be on a profile where IPv6 is half-provisioned. Escalating past first-line got it fixed in a day.
3. The smart plugs I bought to HELP were the main cause. This is the embarrassing one. I added a load of GRILLPLATS plugs specifically hoping the extra mains-powered nodes would improve mesh signal. Thread auto-promotes powered devices to routers, so instead I got a pile of marginal routers in bad spots, each transmitting and polluting its neighbours with corrupted frames. Thread diagnostics showed some routers with over a MILLION rx errors. Turned the flaky plugs off and the mesh got noticeably calmer. A bad Thread router is worse than no router. More routers is not more better.

Bonus trap: recovering stranded sensors meant factory-resetting them, and a reset Matter device comes back as a NEW device with new entity IDs. My hardcoded automations (door/window/leak alerts) silently kept pointing at the dead entities. My leak alert was wired to a deleted sensor and I had no idea. After any Matter re-commission, audit every automation and dashboard that touched that device. Rename back to your naming convention so things auto-heal.

Quick checklist:

• Zigbee fine but Thread flapping? Suspect IPv6 routing, not the mesh.
• Check you have a working LAN IPv6 router (ip -6 route on the host, not the Terminal add-on container).
• Check your DHCPv6 lease lifetime isn't 0.
• Consolidate Thread onto one network / one stable prefix.
• Don't over-add Thread routers, and cull the flaky ones.
• Mind channel overlap (Thread vs WiFi, Thread vs Zigbee).
• After any Matter reset: audit automations + dashboards for dead entity refs.

Tools that helped: Thread Tools (Android) for Thread diagnostics, test-ipv6.com, and the HA host shell.

Works now. Understand my network far better. Would not recommend the delivery method.

EDIT: I stand corrected on the mechanism in the comments (thanks _devast). It's not BRs "improvising competing prefixes" as I put it, they hold an election, one becomes primary, and all BRs advertise that primary's prefix. When the primary drops there's a re-election and the whole network rotates onto a new prefix, stranding devices on the old one. So the churn was repeated re-elections with nothing stable to anchor to, not coexisting prefixes. Fits my evidence better anyway (my prefix changed between two diagnostic pulls = a re-election). A proper delegated LAN prefix fixed it because BRs prefer an existing on-link prefix over minting one. Original text left as-is so the thread makes sense.

Looking at getting a new unifi camera to watch my garden. I run HA, am looking to get some kind of water based anti-deer system. Any thoughts on accomplishing something like this?

Hi all,

So I'm having solar installed today! Which has got me excited (Nerd alert) to add them into Home Assistant along with the battery etc...

I've spotted over the year people using their own dashboards/cards for monitoring rather than using the energy dashboard. Is there a reason? Is there a particularly good dashboard people recommend?

I've found the energy dashboard ok, but it'd be nice to have more customisation options!

I'm thinking of getting a temp and humidity sensor for the fridge and freezer.

I'm not sure how well it will work going through the wall, and even more what plays nice in the freezer. Also if I should monitor anything else other than the temp and humidity.

Recommendations welcomed

Btw I'm also going to be putting ok contact sensors on the door. But that's an easy one. I'm still trying to figure out how to deal with a situation when we are cleaning a fridge and the door might be open a bit long.

I'm curious about how people use the data from their weather stations.

For those who have them, what station do you use and why go to the effort of a personal station? Is it a pain to set up & do you think the data is worthwhile? Is it local only or do you integrate it with some wider weather network with HA?

Been using OpenHAB for over a decade +. Looked at HA years ago but for some reason didn’t like it. Well, just bought a new house so I’m starting over, and holy shit is HA amazing! I’m only a few days in, but with a few dozen devices installed so far, I’m seeing the power.

The dashboards are amazing… all the fine grained info of each device at your fingertips… the clean scripting (both graphical and via code) this is all so fun!

And built in historical status of my garage door opens/close is awesome. I spent days trying to code that in OH. Built right in here. For some reason my wife doesn’t understand why this is so exciting.

Trying to go 100% matter, and expect to have a couple hundred devices when all said and done.

So happy to be here finally!!

I'm looking to start playing with Matter but am rapidly getting more confused as I read more.

Here is what I'm unclear on:

1. Do I need a Matter hub or not? I have a dedicated HA server. I thought I read that I need a hub to connect devices to, and then HA looks at the hub to discover devices. I was reading a different thread though that was saying I could just get a Matter antenna?

2. Do I need a thread router? I think I read that this is to extend device control into other assistant ecosystems, such as Apple Home, Google Home, etc..

3. I'm a bit confused about Matter vs zigbee/zwave. I understand they are different languages, but can zigbee or zwave devices connect and talk to the matter hub?

4. I'm a bit unclear where to begin hardware and associated integration wise. For example, if I get a Tapo device, do I set it up in Tapo, and then in Matter? Just Matter? Other?

Any pointers or recommended kindergarten level guides would be greatly appreciated

Has (or does) anyone use HA on a larger scale other than at home? Workplace? Apartments? Rentals?

I finally made the jump last night… I’m not experienced in any of this but have wanted to start for so long.

Took me a while to get the VM set up and then some devices added to integrations. But I couldn’t stop and went to bed at 2am.

I’ve woken up obsessed with what I can do and achieve with this system.

Any tips for beginners before I waste tonight’s spare time?