We’ve monitored temperature and air quality. Now comes perimeter security. BLE smart locks are the “final boss” of Bluetooth in a smart home because they need a secure, encrypted, two-way connection. Sensors can drop a packet and you won’t care.…
We’ve covered temperature sensors (e.g., Govee) and mechanical actuators (e.g., SwitchBot). Now comes the most valuable “health layer” in a smart home: Indoor Air Quality (IAQ). A lot of “smart air monitors” push data over Wi-Fi and vendor apps. A…
SwitchBot is the king of retrofitting: it can press dumb buttons, pull curtains, and lock doors without replacing hardware. In Home Assistant, the BLE approach is popular with power users because it can be local, fast, and hub-free—but it’s also…
Govee BLE thermometers/hygrometers are cheap and surprisingly useful in Home Assistant—if the Bluetooth side is engineered properly. The integration itself is mostly UI-based today, but to make it robust (no dropouts, good range, usable automations) there are two places where…
“Car arrival detection” is one of the most useful automations you can build because it’s faster and more reliable than GPS when done properly. The idea is simple: This article shows a reliable setup using BLE + smart timeouts so…
This is the “works in real life” pattern: You end up with one “source of truth” entity you can use everywhere:binary_sensor.presence_home_final 1) Inputs you need A) BLE present (fast) This should be ON if any ESP32 Bluetooth Proxy sees your…
Physical buttons are the missing piece in many smart homes. Phone apps are fine, but a real smart house needs instant tactile control: BLE buttons and fobs are a great way to do this because they’re: This guide shows how…
BLE temperature/humidity sensors are one of the cheapest “high impact” upgrades you can add to Home Assistant. You can scatter them everywhere: But people run into the same problem: “It works for a day, then stops updating.” This article shows…
Bluetooth in Home Assistant can feel magical one day and useless the next—until the proxy network is designed properly. Most “BLE problems” are not software problems. They are RF placement problems: walls, metal, reflections, interference, and bad proxy density. This…
Marantz AVRs integrate cleanly with Home Assistant over the local network. There are three main integrations you’ll see in HA, and choosing the right one matters: Marantz Cinema models (like Cinema 60) work fine with HA; one common requirement for…
Room presence is one of those Home Assistant upgrades that changes everything. Not “someone is home”, but who is in which room, in real time, with automations that feel instant: You can do this without cameras, without Wi-Fi triangulation, and…
The ESP-01 (and ESP-01S) is the smallest, most annoying, and most misunderstood ESP8266 module. It can be incredibly useful (Wi-Fi bridge, tiny sensor node, UART→Wi-Fi device), but only if you wire it correctly and respect its boot pins. This guide…
The ESP8266 is the chip that kicked off the Wi-Fi microcontroller revolution. Even today it’s still a great choice for simple IoT devices: cheap, small, and supported everywhere. But it has quirks (boot pins, one ADC input, weak power rails…
The ESP32-DevKitC V4 is the “classic ESP32” dev board most tutorials assume. But the internet is full of half-truths: pinout posters without context, ADC guides ignoring Wi-Fi conflicts, and “use GPIO0” recipes that break boot. This guide is meant to…
The ESP8266 started life as a tiny Wi-Fi module but quickly became a full microcontroller platform. Under the metal cans, almost all modules use the same chip (ESP8266EX) – what changes is: This guide covers the most common variants you’ll…