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…
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…
Integrating KNX with Home Assistant (HA) is the “gold standard” for professional-grade smart homes. While Wi-Fi and Zigbee are great for hobbyists, KNX offers a hardwired, decentralized backbone that works even if HA is offline. To bridge these two worlds,…
Build an ESP32 air quality station for Home Assistant using SCD41 or SCD30 for CO₂, SGP40 for VOCs, and SDS011 for PM2.5, with clear wiring, ESPHome setup, MQTT alternatives, dashboard examples, and practical automations for healthier indoor air. If you…
Learn how to use ESP32 with LoRa for long-range remote sensing in Home Assistant, with practical node and gateway design, MQTT topics, YAML sensors, and reliability tips for garden, well, or shed monitoring Wi-Fi is great indoors, but it often…
A huge amount of serious home energy hardware speaks Modbus RTU over RS-485: With one ESP32 and a cheap MAX485 (RS-485) transceiver, you can build a gateway that: This guide covers: 1. Modbus RTU & RS-485 in 2 minutes 2.…
If you’ve ever forgotten wet laundry in the washing machine for 3 hours, you already understand the value of this automation. Laundry machines and dryers have a very distinct power signature: By monitoring power, Home Assistant can reliably detect: This…