Guides, explainers, and editorials for the modern smart home engineer.
Explainer
An actionable notification in Home Assistant is a push with buttons: you attach an actions list to the payload, the phone shows tappable choices, and...
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Explainer
A smart microchip pet door reads your pet’s existing 15-digit ISO ID chip and unlocks only for them — keeping the neighbour’s cat, the local...
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Explainer
Home Assistant notifications are the layer that turns a house full of sensors into a system that actually tells you something. In my setup they...
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Explainer
Automatic off-site Home Assistant backups mean a full nightly archive that leaves your hub without you touching it — copied to a NAS and synced...
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Explainer
Mushroom is the fastest way I know to turn a plain Home Assistant dashboard into something that looks designed and feels good under a thumb....
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Explainer
A working Home Assistant backup is a full snapshot of your configuration, database, and add-ons that you can restore onto fresh hardware in under an...
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Explainer
The best Zigbee coordinator stick is the one with a modern chipset, current firmware, and — this is the part people skip — a short...
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Explainer
After years of rebuilding dashboards, I keep coming back to the same short list of cards. On any given view in my setup you will...
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Explainer
A Zigbee2MQTT setup guide that holds up in real life comes down to four things: a decent coordinator on a USB extension cable, a quiet...
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Explainer
Node-RED vs Home Assistant automations comes down to readability under pressure: I run roughly 90% of my rules as native HA automations (trigger, condition, action)...
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