Guides, explainers, and editorials for the modern smart home engineer.
Explainer
Every good Home Assistant dashboard is built on top of tidy entities, and every messy one is built on top of chaos. Before you place...
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Explainer
Securing smart home devices comes down to five habits: change default passwords, keep firmware current, kill unnecessary cloud accounts, isolate the devices on their own...
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Explainer
For Home Assistant, an SSD beats an SD card decisively: SD cards wear out from the recorder’s constant small writes and fail suddenly, usually within...
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Explainer
A Home Assistant template sensor is a brand-new entity you build from existing state using a Jinja template. In my setup the headline win is...
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Explainer
Reliable arrive and leave notifications in Home Assistant come from combining several presence signals, not from “phone joined the Wi-Fi.” Layer GPS zone transitions, a...
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Explainer
A phone dashboard has a different job from a wall tablet, and the mistake almost everyone makes is trying to use one layout for both....
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Explainer
The best pet GPS tracker for most people is a cellular LTE-M model with real-time location and a geofence alert — budget roughly $5–15 a...
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Explainer
A floorplan dashboard is the most intuitive control layout there is: instead of hunting through a list of entities, you look at a map of...
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Explainer
You cut Home Assistant notification spam with three techniques layered together: debounce collapses a burst of state changes into one alert, throttle enforces a minimum...
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Explainer
Build smart TV home automation scenes that power the TV, switch inputs, dim lights, and drop blinds in one tap, all on local control.
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