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…
This guide explains the most common ESP8266 variants (ESP-01, ESP-12E/F, NodeMCU and D1 mini) and shows their pinouts, safe GPIOs, and boot-sensitive pins to avoid. The ESP8266 started life as a tiny Wi-Fi module but quickly became a full microcontroller…
If you followed our Bluetooth Proxy Guide, you probably have an ESP32 sitting behind a sofa or plugged into a wall, doing a great job listening for Bluetooth signals. But it’s wasted potential. That ESP32 is a powerful microcontroller running…
So, you’ve followed our Bluetooth Proxy 2025 Guide and have an ESP32 piping Bluetooth signals into Home Assistant. Amazing, right? But maybe you’re noticing your Xiaomi thermometer batteries are draining faster than usual. Or perhaps your SwitchBot Lock keeps showing…