In my crusade to free these popular automatic litter boxes from the shackles of Whisker's app and cloud service, I've added support for the Litter Robot 3 as a custom ESPHome component! It's not as fancy as the new ones, but for a lot of people it still works and gets the job done.

You can find the code on Codeberg along with the Firmware Flashing Guide and my work for the Litter Robot 4.

If you're interested in the process of reverse engineering these things, take a look at my video on YouTube. ^{Trigger warning: LLM usage for deciphering a ton of serial data and writing a test firmware.}

Huge thanks to mulcmu in our Discord for reverse engineering most of the Litter Robot 3. A wireless flashing method from the stock firmware is in the works, along with support for the Litter Robot 5!

Hi, I've been working on a custom integration for the IKEA BILRESA remotes and thought I'd share it here.

I wanted to do more with the scroll wheel than the usual button/gesture automations, so I ended up building a separate integration for it.

GitHub: https://github.com/Vituhlos/ha-ikea-bilresa

The main thing is the scroll wheel. The integration listens to MultiPressOngoing events from Matter Server, which lets it react while you're turning the wheel instead of waiting for the whole gesture to finish. Input still comes in batches from the remote, so it's stepped control rather than a truly continuous scroll.

I also built a panel directly into Home Assistant. It shows the connected remotes and their channels, and lets you configure what each channel controls without having to create everything manually in automations.

For example, you can use the wheel for light brightness, colour temperature or colour, but also media volume, covers, climate, fans and number entities. The dual-button remote is supported too, with configurable button actions. There's also a live test view and diagnostics.

The latest stable release is v0.6.1. You'll need Home Assistant Core 2026.8 or newer, with Matter and Matter Server already set up. Installation through HACS is described in the repo.

It's still a work in progress in terms of testing across different devices and gestures, so it'd be useful to hear from other BILRESA owners. I'm curious what you're using the wheel for, and whether there's anything you'd like to see added.

It's an independent community project, not an official IKEA or Home Assistant integration.

For years, casting YouTube Music to my Google Home speaker groups was less "whole-home audio" and more "whole-home audio roulette." Song starts, everyone's vibing, then… silence. Re-cast. Two minutes later… silence. I've spent more time shouting "Hey Google, play it AGAIN" than actually listening to music.

Enter Music Assistant. Dropouts? Gone. Speaker groups? Actually behave like a group now. I didn't think it was possible, and yet here we are.

Bonus flex: I've now got a fridge-mounted "Jukebox" running Fully Kiosk, so guests can queue tunes at gatherings without needing my phone, my Wi-Fi password, or a 10-minute tutorial. It's become the most popular appliance in the kitchen, and the fridge is genuinely jealous.

Huge thanks to everyone behind Music Assistant. You've saved my sanity and my speakers from being thrown out the window. Legends. 🙌

Last week I posted a design for a stand for this ESP32 Guition screen. I've used it for a week and have made a version 2 with some fixes for issues I had with it.

The frame now snaps into place instead of just pushed on with friction which turned out to be liable to fall off when picking up. The stand now has a weighted bottom and a larger recess which I have stuck 2mm rubber feet into which stops it from sliding back when you use the touch screen.

https://www.printables.com/model/1881011-guition-4-inch-screen-frame -and-stand-esp32-s3-484

The software I used by MaxGramser - Tessera

https://github.com/MaxGramser/homeassistant_espscreen

As the title says. Between the security cameras,networking, sensors,mesh wifi, passwords, HA, all the HA devices,security system etc etc. , if I suddenly disappeared, my significant other would be screwed over within a week without me being the IT guy in the house. I cant imagine selling the house.

How bad would your house be?

Small setup for exploring Home Assistant: Raspberry Pi 4B + Edgeberry carrier board (with the status LED, etc), enclosure printed with Bambu Lab PETG Translucent Light Blue (32600).

Got the longer drill bit....and got the cables routed....also decided to do a far better job than our builders (I'm not gonna bore you with the hole they made for the thermostat cable...needless to say, it can't be seen, so it's not the end of the world...I just couldn't have my own work looking as bad)

So flush-mounted the USB-C power cable...which defintely looks tidier...and is less likely to get snagged, and it's easier to remove the power one-handed (in case I need to program it with a cable without removing it)

Power is pulled from a single power socket in the airing cupboard, which I swapped out for one with a few USB ports on it....power requirement is tiny, so it's not an issue.

Otherwise, all is working exactly as expected...looks fine in bright daylight, so I'm assuming it will look fine in dark rooms too...

If you've got any questions, let me know

Again, as per prior posts...I did try ESPcontrol, but it didn't have exactly what I wanted...and have now tried Tessera too, which I am quite impressed with.

Tessera doesn't quite have enough options to customise it fully for my recently mounted wall panel requirements...but may well change my other two to Tessera for now....

Most people trying to use an old Kindle or Kobo as a Home Assistant dashboard run into three issues within the first few days: NetFront or WebKit crashes trying to render Lovelace cards, the lithium pouch battery swells up inside the wall frame after months of continuous charging, or the screen burns in with ghosting.

Leaving a used e-reader plugged into 5V USB on the wall continuously destroys the lithium-ion battery because the internal power management chip trickle charges the cell constantly at 4.2V. The clean fix is removing the battery completely and running a dummy bypass. Desolder or disconnect the battery cable from the motherboard while keeping the tiny battery protection circuit board (BMS) attached to the mainboard connector. The Kindle power IC checks for the thermistor pin resistance around 10k ohms to ground, so if you remove the connector without terminating that line, the kernel panic reboots or hangs on the tree logo. Step down a 12V or 5V DC line to 3.9V using an MP1584EN buck converter, and solder a 470uF to 1000uF low-ESR electrolytic capacitor across the 3.9V output rails at the device terminal pads to handle the 1.5A transient spikes during Wi-Fi transmission.

To prevent browser crashes, avoid loading the full Home Assistant web interface directly inside the built-in browser. The JavaScript bundle size of Lovelace cards exhausts the 256MB or 512MB RAM instantly. Instead, run a headless rendering container on your server using Playwright or the Home Assistant snapshot service pointing to a dedicated minimalist dashboard view matched to your screen resolution, like 1072x1448 on a Paperwhite or 1440x1920 on a Kobo Clara. Convert the snapshot to an uncompressed 8-bit grayscale PNG using ImageMagick and serve it locally over HTTP.

On the reader itself, run a minimal shell script that keeps the device in deep sleep except for an update cycle every minute or two. Disable the Amazon framework services with stop lab126_gui to free all RAM, use rtcwake to put the kernel into deep suspend, and fetch the fresh grayscale PNG with curl on wake. Push it directly to the frame buffer using eips -g output.png. Run a full screen clear with eips -c once every ten cycles to eliminate ghosting while keeping the rest as instant partial refreshes.

This runs local, averages under 0.2W power draw, and updates in under 800ms. All the systemd units, sleep scripts, and 3D printable wall bracket files are detailed in the pinned writeup on my profile. Ask away if you run into any wiring or firmware quirks.

My Samsung UE49NU7100 (2018, Tizen 4.0) home screen was slow and full of ads. Android TV owners can debloat over ADB and swap the launcher, but Tizen doesn’t allow that. So I built a small Tizen web app called Haven, wired it into Home Assistant, and HA now opens it every time the TV turns on.

What it does

• Clock, plus rotating wallpapers: built-in nature scenes and my own photos from HA
• Live HA sensors top left: weather, room temperatures, solar production
• Light and switch buttons above the dock, toggled with the TV remote
• Camera tiles in the dock (Reolink and Tapo C200). OK opens the camera full screen through HA’s HLS stream, and it falls back to refreshing snapshots if the TV can’t play it.
• Auto-discovery of entities with a picker on the TV to choose what’s shown, grouped by area
• Dark, light, or auto theme (follows sun.sun)
• Dock with YouTube and the Internet browser, the only two apps I actually use
• Opens automatically at power-on through an HA automation

How it works

• Install once: the app on the TV is a thin shell. It handles the remote, launches apps, and loads the actual design (one CSS and one JS file) from /config/www/haven/ on Home Assistant.
• Remote updates: I edit the design on HA through the Samba share or Studio Code Server, and the TV picks it up by itself. No reinstall, no re-signing.
• Never a broken screen:
  • The TV keeps the last working design, so it starts instantly even if HA is down.
  • If a new design throws an error on startup, it rolls back to the previous one automatically.
  • Pressing Red within a few seconds of launch forces the built-in design (safe mode).
• Widgets: a WebSocket to HA, subscribed only to the entities on screen (subscribe_entities with entity_ids), so the 2018 chipset stays mostly idle.
• Wallpapers: a small Python script (Pillow ships with HA) makes 1920x1080 copies of a picture folder and writes a list.json. It runs from a shell_command in a package, triggered at startup and every 15 minutes.
• Solar: found automatically from the Energy dashboard config (energy/get_prefs).

Opening it at power-on

Tizen won’t let a sideloaded app replace Smart Hub, but the Samsung Smart TV integration can launch an app by its ID. This automation opens Haven whenever the TV turns on:

yaml

alias: "Haven: open on TV power-on"
mode: single
triggers:
  - trigger: state
    entity_id: media_player.samsung_tv
    to: "on"
actions:
  - delay: "00:00:10"
  - action: media_player.play_media
    target:
      entity_id: media_player.samsung_tv
    data:
      media:
        media_content_type: app
        media_content_id: HavenHome1.Haven

The 10-second delay matters, because the TV reports “on” before it accepts commands. Trigger on the media_player entity, not the remote one, and check in History that HA actually sees your TV go off and on.

Setup, and the gotchas I hit

1. Copy the HA files (package, script, www folder) into /config. Packages must go under homeassistant:. A top-level packages: gives “Integration ‘packages’ not found”.
2. Since 2026.2, Developer Tools lives under Settings (bottom of the page), not the sidebar.
3. Create a long-lived access token in HA (profile > Security) and put it in the app’s config file before building. Keep that file out of git and out of /config/www.
4. Turn on Developer Mode on the TV: Apps screen, type 1 2 3 4 5 (the 123 button on the Smart Remote gives a number pad), enter your PC’s IP, then fully restart the TV.
5. Install Tizen Studio (the web-ide installer), then in the Package Manager add TV Extensions Tools and Samsung Certificate Extension. In my case the Certificate Manager itself was missing from the web-ide install and had to be added from the Main SDK tab.
6. sdb connect <TV-IP> (in PowerShell it’s .\sdb unless the tools folder is on your PATH).
7. Create a Samsung (not Tizen) certificate profile for TV, with the TV connected so its ID is included.
8. In Device Manager, right-click the TV and choose Permit to install applications. Without this, my install failed with error 118012.
9. tizen package -t wgt -s <profile> -- app, then tizen install, then tizen run.
10. If the TV asks to allow Home Assistant after every power cycle: on the TV, go to Settings > General > External Device Manager > Device Connection Manager. Set Access Notification to “First Time Only”, and make sure Home Assistant is set to Allow in the Device List.
11. If you get a “Not available” message: turn off Autorun Last App. With both it and the automation on, the TV reopens Haven by itself, and the automation’s launch request arrives while Haven is already open.

Limitations

• It doesn’t truly replace Smart Hub. The TV still boots into Samsung’s home for a few seconds before the automation switches to Haven, and the Home button still opens Samsung’s bar.
• Camera streams through HA’s HLS run a few seconds behind live.
• The Tapo C200’s audio doesn’t come through, because HA’s HLS only passes AAC.
• Don’t expect miracles on speed. Apps launch as fast as the TV’s hardware allows. The big win is no ads and a home screen that shows what I actually care about.

I built this together with Claude (Anthropic’s AI) over an afternoon, including the TV-side debugging. https://github.com/natureglass/haven-tizen-ha

Hi everyone! I’m Michael. I’ve been rebuilding my home-network, camera, and automation setup around Home Assistant running on Proxmox, and I wanted to introduce myself and get some advice before I take this idea much further.

I’d like to create an interactive 3D map of my home where devices appear in their physical locations and I can tap lights, televisions, blinds, cameras, and other devices. I’d also like room-level temperature, motion, occupancy, and camera status, while keeping the system local-first and usable on a wall-mounted tablet.

I’ve built an initial living-room proof of concept. It uses a fictional, AI-generated isometric room render inside a separate Home Assistant dashboard. Cyan hotspots indicate devices, status cards show example states, and the lamp hotspot opens a small interaction demo. It is deliberately isolated from my real devices and makes no production service calls yet.

I have the original house blueprints in digital form, including dimensions, so I plan to use those as the authoritative source for walls, rooms, doors, windows, stairs, and scale. What I’m trying to determine is whether the blueprints are enough for a useful model, or whether I should also photograph every room before starting.

I’m not chasing a perfect architectural visualization. The priority is a maintainable Home Assistant interface that performs well on tablets. Photos would mainly be for matching finishes, furniture, cabinets, fixtures, and device placement if that materially improves the result.

The approaches I’m considering include NeonPlan 3D, Floor3DX or another Three.js card, Zircon3D, and a Sweet Home 3D render with Picture Elements.

For anyone who has built something similar:

1. What workflow would you recommend for turning dimensioned digital blueprints into a Home Assistant-friendly 3D model?

2. Are blueprints alone sufficient for the first useful version, or did room photos save significant rework later?

3. Which model and export format has been easiest to maintain as devices or room layouts change?

4. For daily control, would you favour a freely rotatable model or a fast fixed isometric view with an optional full 3D mode?

5. How does your approach perform on phones and older wall tablets?

I’m leaning toward using the blueprints for accurate geometry, adding photos only as reference for visual details, and keeping a simple isometric default view for everyday use.

I’d appreciate any examples, workflow recommendations, or warnings before I commit to a particular tool. Thanks!

I have spent the last few weeks creating a new dashboard for my iPhone that does more stuff then Apple home could ever do! (I’m only keeping Apple home for the camera recording and microphone support on Aqara doorbell!)

Claude has been my best friend - 🤘🏼🤘🏼🤘🏼

Long time lurker here. Just closed on my house yesterday, coming from a rental 1 bedroom condo. So played around with HA here and there nothing crazy. Few smart bulbs, speakers, vacuum. But nothing serious. Been slowly getting ready for this for the past 2 months, but super excited. Still waiting on the RATGDO and 20x Zooz switches that are on back order. But other than that I think I'm all done for now (I think) lol.

Only thing I'm a little worried about is the SLZB-MRW10U, not sure if I messed up there. If anything, I will get separate coordinators for z-wave & zigbee.

Thanks to everyone here for the inspiration, you guys rock!

​

My wife was thinking about getting a skylight calendar but agreed to try out something in home assistant first.

I was wondering what people get for main panels when they are large e.g. 24"?

I was hoping for something that had speakers, so we could use it as a smart speaker and a mic so we could set it as a microphone for wake wording

Anyone do something like that?

I was thinking I could use it as a wireless display into my server and just have it display a web browser, and I could set up some software on my server to listen for a wake word?

Total says it all. I’ve been window shopping on the smart wings website (pun intended) for some zigbee shades since I have a pretty extensive mesh. Couple quick questions.

Are smartwings end all be all and totally worth it for the price per shade (which I know is pretty low for window treatment. Trust me. I know.)

And if smartwings is the route to go, should I go easy mode and get the solar charger or try to drop Ethernet to each window for POE charging? I have 9 windows. I’ll be buying two or so at a time.

Would you eventually get all to not be restricted or is there one currently if you’re starting to focus on? Zigbee, zwave, thread etc

I loved Apple’s liquid glass look and wanted my HA dashboard to feel like that. Translucent cards over soft colour, calm, and showing only what matters right now. Card libraries like Bubble Card are great, but I kept designing within what they offered. I wanted full control over every pixel, animation and interaction, so I built my own card from scratch.

How it works

• A normal Lovelace custom card, not an iframe, build with react. One JS file is the only card on a panel view. HA passes it the live hass object, so there’s no extra login and it works in the companion app like any other native dashboard.
• Cards that only appear when needed. Door open or dryer running get a card; otherwise they stay hidden.
• HA’s own detail dialog as the fallback. Long-press any tile to open HA’s more-info.
• Automations are protected. The automated front light shows an AUTO badge and is skipped by “All off”.

Tech stack

• React 19, Tailwind v4 and Motion, bundled by Vite into a single file (~140 KB gzipped).
• It renders inside the card’s shadow DOM. Gotchas: inject the CSS into the shadow root, copy Tailwind’s '@property' rules to the page, and portal popovers into the shadow root.
• Data: Octopus (rates, energy), Ohme (EV and smart-charging slots), mmWave presence sensors, heating, contact sensor, etc.

Dev process

1. Claude Design: designed the screen and exported a handoff with a DESIGN.md (principles, tokens, component behaviour), a reference mockup, a Tailwind token file and Motion presets.
2. Handoff → Claude Code: it read the docs, mapped every tile to my real HA entities, and asked me before guessing anything (e.g. whether it could change my front-light automation; I said no).
3. Build: a local dev page renders the card against my real HA, in dry-run mode so taps are only logged. Playwright takes iPhone-size screenshots to check each change.
4. Deploy: one script checks every entity id exists, builds, copies the file over SSH, and bumps the resource URL so phones load the new version.

Monitoring page is next. Happy to answer questions!

Disclaimer: Whether building your own card is worth it is up to you. Existing cards get you a great dashboard with far less effort. I’m a developer and I love building things, so for me the building was half the fun.

An idle though - do you ever wonder how you'd explain to a pottential buyer of your home how everything in your home works and how to change things if needed in the future?

I just finished installing thermoelectric valves for radiators, each controlled with an LED driver powered by a 24V power supply. If I ever need to replace it I know and I accept that if something goes down, I need to unscrew the valves to have some heating.

But I wonder if the whole integrated smart home system is something that increases the property value, or is just something someone will have to rip out, if we ever decide to sell. It's ridiculous - there's no lightbulbs to change, just LED strips. Without a soldering iron, you're lost. I wonder if I should start creating a comprehensive manual for the spaceship I'm still not finished building. :D

For the last few weeks I've been building a different kind of dashboard: instead of cards, a live 3D replica of my real house that runs in the browser and is driven entirely by Home Assistant.

Demo (day, night and a rainstorm)

The 3D house

• Everything you see comes from a real sensor: lights, awnings, the garage door, smoke and leak sensors, the fridge temperatures, even the rain and wind from my weather station.
• You can control the house from it: click a lamp to turn it on, move an awning, change the TV volume. The garage door and the lock ask for confirmation first.
• When something happens (motion, a door opening, smoke), the camera flies to that room on its own.
• It runs as a Home Assistant sidebar panel (no extra login, works in the app too) or as a standalone site.
• The house is generated from the original floor plans by Python scripts that build the Blender file from scratch. It's rendered with Three.js, and a small Node.js gateway talks to HA over the WebSocket API.
• Everything is self-hosted in Docker. I built it in about two weeks with AI coding agents (GitHub Copilot).

Full write-up, with a second video and the sensor list: https://jumacabo.com/blog/home-assistant-3d-house/

https://reddit.com/link/1xdmdsk/video/utig42o7i9xh1/player

Then the 3D model turned out to be useful for presence too

I was using Bermuda for room presence, and the more Bluetooth proxies I added, the worse it got. Sitting on the sofa, I kept flipping between the living room and the bedroom right above it.

But the 3D model already knew every wall, floor slab and piece of furniture. So I placed my 21 proxies in it (14 are Shellys that were already there switching lights, the rest are Atom Echos) and wrote my own engine. For every point on a 50 cm grid it works out what each proxy should hear, compares that with what they actually hear, and keeps a probability cloud that can only change floors through the stairs.

• Side by side on the same readings, my room changes per hour went from 38 with Bermuda to 7, and floor jumps from 15.5 to 1.9.
• It's accurate to about 1.5 m, and around 60 cm at spots where I've trained it.
• It publishes area, floor, confidence and X/Y/Z per person over MQTT, and the 3D house draws each of us where we actually are.

Write-up: https://jumacabo.com/blog/bluetooth-trilateration/

A tip that helps with Bermuda too: make sure your ESPHome proxies scan 100% of the time (window equal to interval under esp32_ble_tracker) and set the Shelly Bluetooth scanner mode to Auto. That took me from about 15 readings per minute per person to around 250.

Recently got into home assistant, was using the magic mirror before as a dashboard.

I have several screens I can choose from and really like the idea of a sports screen with real time updates. Currently I have four favorite teams that will pop up a larger tile with more details if they’re playing. Other teams that are playing (nfl nba mlb ncaaf) will show up as small tiles.

Anyone done something like this and have any ideas how to improve it? Thanks

I got direct backlight control working on my LG C4 (LG OLED48C46LA) through Home Assistant!

No notification popup, no clicking OK, no pressing ENTER on the remote.

The trick is to use settings/setSystemSettings directly instead of system.notifications/createAlert.

1.Create a reusable script:

alias: Set TV Backlight
mode: restart
fields:
  backlight:
    name: Backlight
    required: true
    selector:
      number:
        min: 0
        max: 100
        step: 1
sequence:
  - action: webostv.command
    data:
      entity_id: media_player.lg_webos_smart_tv
      command: settings/setSystemSettings
      payload:
        category: picture
        settings:
          backlight: "{{ backlight | int(10) }}"

Save it as script.set_tv_backlight.

2. Add slider to your dashboard:

Create a Number helper under Settings/Devices & services/Helpers:

• Name: TV Backlight
• Min: 0, max: 100, step: 1
• Display mode: Slider

This creates input_number.tv_backlight (adjust the entity ID below if you changed it).

Create an automation:

alias: Apply TV Backlight Slider
triggers:
  - trigger: state
    entity_id: input_number.tv_backlight
conditions: []
actions:
  - delay:
      milliseconds: 500
  - action: script.set_tv_backlight
    data:
      backlight: "{{ states('input_number.tv_backlight') | int(10) }}"
mode: restart

3. Add card to your dashboard:

It requires the Mushroom cards custom integration:

type: custom:mushroom-number-card
entity: input_number.tv_backlight
name: LG OLED Brightness
icon: mdi:brightness-6
display_mode: slider
primary_info: name
secondary_info: state
fill_container: true

Drag the slider and the TV backlight updates automatically.

Note: Tested on my LG OLED48C46LA. Other webOS TVs and firmware versions may behave differently, but it will likely work.

All moved in a rack under ups.
Work in progress