Per MatterAlpha, the HACS code has been merged into the dev branches and docs point to Core 2026.11 as the intended release, where it'll live as a built-in component called Marketplace.

Worth knowing: everything listed there stays community-maintained — HA doesn't test or audit any of it, and installing one takes a warning first.

Article: https://www.matteralpha.com/news/home-assistant-embraces-hacs-into-core-as-the-marketplace

I've been wanting a touchscreen calendar/home assistant dashboard for a while now and could not justify the subscription and cost of a Skylight Max.

I would be lying if I said this didn't cost almost as much but it is completely self-hosted and no subscription.

AI: I am running Qwen 3.8 27b on two 3080 20 gig cards through ollama. It has complete control of home assistant and access to my calendar through Google's API.

Audio: I am using the seeed respeaker with XIAO running ESP home connected to an ONN 2.1 channel LED sound bar.

Screen: I am using quite literally the cheapest 27-in touch screen monitor that I could find on Amazon and it works amazing

Computer: C4 MINI PC

I ran the electricity through the walls so there are minimal wires visible.

The screen switches to a slideshow mode that family is able to add pictures through copyparty.

Music assistant is integrated so I am able to cast music to my other devices including my Yamaha receiver that has 7.1 surround sound.

I have notifications built in to where it tells me if the dryer / washer is done and if the oven is turned on because I have a jailbroken emporia view 3.

I think I have mentioned everything I have done but I am happy to answer any questions.

Ran out of stuff to tinker with on my homelab so started up Home Assistant. Got a POE esp32 Bluetooth proxy and set up a couple of lights.

Moving forward, it looks like I’m going to need a hub. Is Zigbee the gold standard?

Hi everyone!

I’m hosting a Home Assistant Community Day 2026 meetup in Mississauga, Ontario on Saturday, November 7.

This will be my first time hosting Community Day, and I’m hoping to bring together Home Assistant users and smart-home enthusiasts from Mississauga and the GTA.

The plan is a relaxed meetup with:

• a local-first Home Assistant demo
• Zigbee / Z-Wave / Matter & Thread / ESPHome discussion
• dashboard and automation show-and-tell
• hardware discussion
• troubleshooting / Q&A
• plenty of time to just talk smart homes

Beginners are welcome as well.

The venue is currently being finalized in Mississauga.

Event / RSVP:
https://luma.com/chm7heqb

If you’re in the GTA and interested, I’d love to see you there. Also happy to hear suggestions from anyone who has hosted a Community Day before!

I’ve been using ZHA for years. It worked, was simple, seemed to have all the device support I needed. Until I bought smart blinds from China. They were zigbee but not supported by ZHA. I ended up having to go with a cloud-connected Tuya bridge which was super unreliable. Any automation would trigger some blinds but not all of them so half of my blinds would open (or close) and it defeated the purpose of spending the money and trying to automate things. I’d read that Z2MQTT had better device support and was fed up so I thought I’d try Z2MQTT in parallel with a second sonoff usb dongle and if the blinds worked, I’d migrate everything.

Turns out the Z2MQTT device support is better and the blinds are super reliable now. Problem is, I have well over 100 zigbee devices connected to ZHA with 150+ automations. In many cases one device may be in a dozen automations, meaning I could be looking at hundreds of individual modifications in order to fully convert. Some zigbee devices rely on other powered zigbee relays so I’ll need to convert entire branches of the network at once. Just a serious pain in the ass.

I’m open to being told otherwise but this is going to take a couple of weeks to convert in the hours after work. Anyone debating ZHA vs Z2MQTT with a new build, go with the latter. Much nicer…

For a while a lot of people seemed to be struggling with the Aqara FP300, so I decided to finally write up my experiences with it and how I made it work 100% reliably in our bathroom (and other rooms afterwards). Hopefully this helps someone. https://www.inlimbo.org/2026/10/aqara-fp300-use/

Tonight, while messing with Music Assistant, I tried to play music with my phone and Heos speaker at the same time. Once I exited the app from my phone, standing next to the Heos, I heard a faint sound from my hallway! Somehow I figured out how to play music from my Ecobee. Normally, you have to use Siri or whatever. I'm working on figuring out what the right combo is to get the music direct to the thermostat. Has anyone else gotten their Ecobee to play music directly?

So I just found these lights on Amazon that are "smart". However, it appears they are Bluetooth, I haven't yet determined if they individually require connection or if they somehow talk to each other.

"Linkind Smart Solar Spot Lights Outdoor SL5C, IP67 Solar Lights Outdoor"

https://a.co/d/06UQwvIL

I'm curious if anyone has used these in general, but also specifically with Home Assistant?

I tried searching all Reddit, I tried searching Amazon reviews, etc. Home Assistant has an AiDot integration, but it's for their light bulbs.

With Halloween coming up, I thought some landscape lighting would be nice to have. We live in a corner house surrounded by a planter and large bushes so even with the house all decorated, it looks pretty sad from the street view. I figured I could look for some solar landscape lights, and then I figured I might as well try to find smart ones.

I'm sure I'll get responses about just doing wired ones, but we have zero outdoor outlets, so I really don't want to deal with that right now. Solar is quick and hopefully easy, even if it's at a bit of a premium, still cheaper than hiring an electrician. I'm open to ideas though. Maybe I'll just get wired ones and plug them into the Halloween decoration extension cords in the short term.

Happy to take any suggestions for holiday landscape lighting that actually works well in general, bonus points if it works with Home Assistant.

EDIT: It looks like they might be similar to Govee where you can connect and configure them individually or you can buy their "Bluetooth mesh hub" to manage them with a central hub

Hello there!

I'm looking for sensors that will allow me to determine as reliably and easily as possible which side of our bed is occupied or unoccupied, and whether someone has just gotten up or just lain down.

Getting up and lying down should be detected as quickly as possible.

Most recently, I tried using pressure pad sensors (https://aliexpress.com/item/1005010633396757.html), but unfortunately they're very unreliable. I think the area they detect is simply too small.

I'm trying to control the window blinds and the lighting in the room based on these sensors, so they really have to be very reliable.

That's why I wanted to ask you which sensors and methods have given you the best results here. Could you perhaps recommend certain sensors to me? Do you think presence sensors would be better suited for this application than pressure pad sensors? Can they also quickly and reliably detect when someone stands up or lies down? Which models would you recommend for this? Or are there perhaps completely different types of sensors that are even better suited for this?

Since I already have a relatively extensive Zigbee network in my smart home, it would of course be ideal if it were a Zigbee sensor. An additional router in the bedroom wouldn’t hurt either. Wi-Fi / ESPhome would also be okay. I don't have any Matter devices yet, and I'd prefer not to get any for now.

Thanks in advance for your help and suggestions!

hey,

Using vwgroup-connect-ha to pull data into Home Assistant for a Golf 8 (Golf Variant Style 1.5 eTSI, leased, MY2024) via VW's official EU Data Act portal. Account-side setup is all correct, but the Data Act pipeline specifically has delivered zero real data in over a week, despite proof the car is actively reporting telemetry elsewhere in VW's systems.

What's confirmed working:

• Usership verified (leaseholder/transferred-right-to-use)
• Correct brand selected (Volkswagen Passenger Cars)
• Blanket EU Data Act consent granted
• Granular per-client consent toggle enabled ("All Data" under vwid.vwgroup.io → Vehicle Consent Management → Vehicle functions)
• We Connect: Aktiv under myVolkswagen → Verträge
• Continuous "Get customised data" request active (All Data, every 15 min, no expiry) for 7+ days

What's not working:
Every single delivery from that continuous request — dozens of them, every 15 minutes — comes back as an empty no_content_found.zip (0 KB).

The part that rules out "car just needs more telemetry":
I exported the short-term trip data directly from VW's own system and it shows multiple separate trips over the past month — including a drive the day before my latest check. VW clearly has live telemetry for this vehicle. Yet the Data Act portal pulled another no_content_found.zip roughly 20 hours after that drive, well past any "car needs to feed telemetry in" grace period I've seen referenced elsewhere.

So: real trip/telemetry data demonstrably exists for this vehicle, drive+lock cycles are happening regularly, consent and usership are all correctly configured — but the EU Data Act export pipeline specifically isn't picking any of it up.

Has anyone seen this specific pattern — data clearly flowing into VW's normal systems (app/short-term memory) but the EU Data Act channel staying permanently empty for a particular vehicle? Trying to figure out if this needs a VW support ticket or if there's a known trick (re-verifying usership, deleting and recreating the request, etc.) before I go that route.

I am just starting with HA and have been using Kasa/TP-Link wall plugs and other sing plugs or switches (18 of them) in Alexa before this. The app is able to control everything as well as through Alexa. I added the TP-Link integration and all but 3 wall outlets connected just fine. The wall outlets say they need an ID and password but I use the password from the app and no joy. I have tried changing the password to not use special characters and still nothing. I have tried a lot of things and nothing. I needed to remove and reinstall one of the plugs and now that has become number 4 that won’t work because it wants an ID and password but won’t take anything.

Has anyone found a way to get past this? I see some notes from previous posts that I may need to get all new devices that use zigbee or something else. That would suck. Thanks.

I’ve just finished putting together a slightly unusual hot water setup at home and thought it might be useful to share in case anyone else is thinking along similar lines.

We already had a Worcester Bosch Highflow 550CDi gas combi/storage boiler supplying the house, but I wanted an alternative hot water source so we could make better use of cheap overnight electricity, solar and battery storage rather than burning gas for all of our hot water. We have tried to get an AirSource but it's not right for us for the moment.

I picked up a very lightly used Gledhill Stainless Pro 300L Direct unvented cylinder. It’s 287 litre capacity and has two 3 kW immersion elements.

Rather than replacing the Worcester, we’ve kept both systems.

The plumbing has been arranged so that the hot water feed going up to the house can be supplied by either:

• the Worcester 550CDi
• the Gledhill Cylinder

The interesting bit is the changeover.

We’ve installed a WRAS-approved 3-way L-port motorised ball valve on the hot water supply. In one position it connects the Worcester to the house, and in the other it connects the Gledhill. The valve physically selects one or the other.

The valve is a 24 V motorised valve and is controlled using a Shelly 1 Gen4, which is integrated into Home Assistant.

So from Home Assistant I can effectively choose:

Hot water source:

• Gas
• Electric cylinder

Each of the two 3 kW immersion elements has its own dedicated electrical circuit and is controlled through a SONOFF BASIC-ZB1GSP DIN-rail Zigbee switch.

I’m using Zigbee2MQTT with Home Assistant, so each immersion gives me:

• independent on/off control
• live power draw
• current
• voltage
• accumulated energy usage

So HA can see something like:

Lower immersion: 2.98 kW
Upper immersion: off
Cylinder energy used today: x kWh

The Gledhill’s own thermostats and thermal cut-outs are still left intact. Home Assistant is only deciding whether an immersion is allowed to run, it isn’t replacing any of the cylinder’s safety controls.

Electrically, we’re on single phase, so the two immersions together are around 6 kW / 26 A. In normal use I probably won’t run them both simultaneously. HA can stagger them and also take other house loads into account.

The main reason for doing all this is tariff optimisation.

Our cheap electricity rate is currently around 3.99p/kWh (finishes in Feb 2027 though), whereas gas is around 10p/kWh. Heating the whole cylinder from cold takes somewhere around 13–15 kWh depending on starting temperature, so a full overnight charge can cost well under £1.

We also have solar and battery storage, so the longer-term logic is along the lines of:

• heat the cylinder overnight on cheap electricity
• top it up from excess solar where useful
• prioritise electric hot water
• keep the Worcester available instantly as backup (we do AirbnB in a room in our house so can't risk not having HW)

A few other bits we’ve incorporated while doing the work:

• separate electrical radial circuits for each immersion
• dedicated RCBO protection
• local double-pole isolation
• 24 V DIN-rail PSU for the motorised valve
• basement cable route from the consumer unit
• Ethernet/Cat6 run to the plant area (future proofing)
• capped hot-water branch ready for a future supply into the garage
• G3 installation/commissioning of the unvented cylinder

We've effectively turned the hot water cylinder into a 287-litre thermal battery.

The clever stuff is optional. If Home Assistant disappears tomorrow, we still have a conventional Gledhill cylinder, a conventional Worcester boiler and manual plumbing controls.

But when the automation is running, we can choose (using the Shelly) the cheapest or most appropriate source of hot water depending on electricity price, solar generation, battery state and household demand.

It's dashboarded into Home Assistant with ChatGPT/Codex.

Hi all. I just wanted to ask to those of you who are really into energy metering you home and appliances… how do you do it?

In my case, I have relied on a combination of clamp based power meters for big circuits (oven and stove, AirCon) and some smart plugs for other smaller devices, also thinking to strengthen my mesh.

However, I am thinking like of simplifying the setup to reduce the burden on the ZB Network but losing that much data granularity concerns me.

So that’s my question: how deep do you meter your house? By rooms? By circuits? By devices?

Does anyone know why I have two different IP addresses for Home Assistant for eth0:

I use the 192.168.68.62 IP to access HA and have never used the other IP of 172.30.33.1.

Can I remove/change the other IP?

I'm running HA on Hyper V with its own external virtual switch (no NAT).

This yaml is the only four lines needed for a script to reload any dashboard. “dashboard-view” is the url base name of my dashboard.

Sometime y his year a change was made so that every time you save edits to a dashboard it automatically reloads the changes on any devices showing it. It’s super fast, about 5x. At least much faster than reloading a page via Fully Kiosk Browser.

I have some older devices like the Lenovo View and Lenovo Smart Clock that really struggle with home assistant dashboards. I have a Smart Clock displaying a camera and it would take almost 20s to reload when I walked into the room. Now it’s just a few seconds to the point I don’t even notice it.

If you need to reload your dashboards often for whatever reason and want it to be faster, give this a try!

Good day.

I am looking to simplify and consolidate the number of apps on my smarthome for controlling smart stuff. I am using a homeassistant green now to gather everything in one place and i even have a few dashboards done. The problem i am having is that i would like to improve my automation with sensors because my house is made of brick so running wires behind walls is impossible and the wiring is older so i dont trust using expensive switches and breaking them.

When i began my smart home i used wyze smart plugs and bulbs but the need for an internet connection has been getting in the way more and more. Power outages have been increasing and internet service has become unreliable. I have home batteries and i am in the process of getting an internet backup solution but since i am rethinking my setup i wanted some ideas. Mainly smart bulbs that have some way to be used offline and smart plugs and the presence sensors to control everything (i am leaning towards zigbee from what ive seen here) but wanted some recommendations because ill need a way to add zigbee to my homeassistant as well.

The one thing i have looked for but havent found a good solution is a way to control my minisplit ac units. I am using the ones from cielo right now but their integration with home assistant has to be manually reset every few months in my case. I doubt ill find one brand that makes sensors, bulbs, plugs and a way to control the ac units but right now im using 3 or 4 different apps through alexa and none can be used offline. Bonus points for a good IR solution to make smart some older tvs and an older window ac unit.

I'm new to Home Assistant so please don't bite. Trying to bring as much of my current stuff into HA before I make tough decisions about repurchasing poor fits. The toughest one so far: I have a LOT of Smart Sleek Socket power strips (https://a.co/d/068jcTvQ). I really preferred them to Kasa and others because I love the fully concealed outlet where it basically looks like there is none. It's wonderful. Their app sucks but it loaded easily in Google Home. What sucks? I can't for the life of me figure out how to get them into HA. No obvious native path, no obvious HACE support. I read something about Sleek Socket compatibility with Tuya so tried that, but I couldn't get them to pair in Tuya. Did I truly choose a non-compatible option?

Thanks!

My cheap Xiaomi MJSXJ10CM (chuangmi.camera.026c05) now follows people and objects around my room, and video never leaves my LAN. I didn't flash it, open it, or downgrade it. It's still on the stock 4.5.6_0450 firmware.The stock firmware already speaks a protocol that hands over video and accepts commands. go2rtc v1.9.14 with the go2rtc-xiaomi-control patch talks to it. You do the Xiaomi auth once, and after that you get 1920x1080 HEVC over RTSP on your own machine. The only internet traffic is that one-time key exchange. Mine was bought and paired in the India region, which turned out to matter.Pan/tilt is a MISS command, opcode 0x112, with { "operation": 1 } (1 left, 2 right, 3 up, 4 down). That's the whole PTZ API.The useful lesson: don't trust acknowledged: true. I measured actual image shift with block matching and found about 1.4s of dead time between a command and visible movement. Steps also aren't symmetric, since left moves further than right. A naive tracker at 12fps fires a pile of extra commands before the first one lands. So after every move, the loop ignores everything for 2s, and the dead zone (0.18) is wider than one step's 8-12% displacement.Detection uses Apple's Vision framework through a small Swift helper, which needs no model downloads. There's also an optional SSD-MobileNet ONNX backend for 80 COCO classes. That one cost me time: feed it a pre-shrunk 300x300 image and it silently returns zero detections. Native 1280x720 works fine.Since it's a motor in my bedroom, it has some safety rules:- It's off by default.- Manual control always wins.- A server-side heartbeat stops it if the dashboard tab closes.- It's capped at 20 steps a minute.- It stops if it loses the target.Full write-up with the details: https://blog.shravanrevanna.me/reverse-engineering-a-xiaomi-camera-into-a-self-tracking-robot

I have had a HA Green running HA since the Green was a kinda new type of device - never had it misbehave until today.

It’s been a couple of months since it was updated and today seemed to be a good day to catch up. Currently on 17.0, updating to 18.3. I’ve ’always’ followed the path of update OS first, then Core, then apps so I made a backup and started OS updating. Display says “updating” and the slider goes left to right over and over.

An hour later I look and “updating” and the slider is are gone. But still says on 17, going to 18.3. Hummm…so I restart the Green, and restart the update process-same outcome, 17/18.3. Still does its HA thing so it’s not dead, but we aren’t moving forward either. I haven’t seen any kind of warning message.

So can someone tell me what I’m doing wrong, or how I can get unstuck from 17.3?

Hi,

I have 2 non-smart sprinkler systems (Orbit - Indoor Easy Dial 6 station and Outdoor 4 station). My front yard and backyard are small, I only use 3 stations (backyard) and 2 stations (front yard).

I want to make them weather smart, be able to stop watering when it rains, and adjust the duration depending on the temperature, and time depending on sunrise/sunset time. Pretty much set and forget, and what's best for the plants and grass. I also want to be able to take them off (and leave the legacy systems) if I sell the house in the future.

What's the best way to do this? Based on what I read, I think my option is: splice into the zone wires, add ESP32 relay board running ESPHome (and disable my legacy system). Any idea how to make it look neat and tidy?

Or is there any other, more practical options?

Update: I have a HomeAssistant hub running on a mini PC. My other connected device is ratgdo.

I run a restaurant in Norway and want to monitor the temperature in 2 cold rooms (target +1 to +4 °C) and 1 freezer room (about -18 to -22 °C). I would like readings in my own web app with alerts, not only in a vendor app.

Constraints

• The rooms are steel-clad. I walked inside with my phone and got no Wi-Fi signal.
• There is no mains power inside the rooms, so it must be a battery sensor.
• It must work in Norway (EU 868 MHz band, not 915 MHz US models).
• No monthly subscription.
• Plug-and-play is preferred, but I can do some setup.
• I would like to send readings to my own app, for example by HTTP POST or MQTT.
• This is a food-safety use, so reliability matters more than price.

What I have looked at so far

• Wi-Fi/Bluetooth/Zigbee sensors (Shelly, Xiaomi BLE, Aqara): ruled out, since 2.4 GHz will not get out of the steel rooms.
• YoLink: The LoRa range through metal looks good in reviews, and the EU 868 MHz versions (EC models) exist, but I cannot find a shop that stocks them for Norway, and the cloud API is vendor-hosted.
• Milesight EM320-TH + LoRaWAN gateway (Dragino LPS8v2 or Milesight UG56): EN12830 certified, -30 to +60 °C, IP67, with a local network server on the gateway. This is my current favourite, but it costs about three times as much as the other options.
• Other LoRaWAN cold-chain sensors: TEKTELIC Tundra, Dragino LHT65N with probe, Enless.
• DIY: ESP32 with DS18B20 probes through the door gasket. The cable is the part I would like to avoid.

Questions

1. Has anyone run LoRaWAN sensors inside a steel walk-in cooler or freezer? Did the signal get through a closed door, and where did you put the gateway?
2. Is the EM320-TH good enough for a freezer, or would you use a TEKTELIC Tundra or a probe-based sensor?
3. Anything to watch out for in cold rooms, such as battery life, condensation or frost on the sensor?
4. Is there an EU 868 MHz YoLink retailer that ships to Norway, or is LoRaWAN the better route?
5. Any experience forwarding data from a local gateway (Node-RED or ChirpStack) to a custom web app?

Thanks for any advice. I can share my findings if it helps anyone else.