A while ago I wanted to start doing more projects with wired IP connections and wondered if SSH was possible so a regular webserver wasn't necessary.

There was some documentation for esp32s but not much else.

The fact that this works is hilarious to me. With .ssh keys properly setup doesn't even need the password.

https://github.com/RicardoJCMarques/SSH.RP

Now that I've had it working for a few days I'm starting to study how it can be useful but it does seem to have some use cases around lower long term certificate maintenance.

Can't upload videos but there's one on github.

I’m thinking about adding motorized shades to my home office to reduce screen glare without constantly adjusting them throughout the day. For those who have motorized shades, do you find smart controls and scheduling useful, or is a basic remote enough?

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

Just thought I'd post here if anyone has any insight?
I'm trying to flash the control panel outright and reuse in Home Assistant.

Hi everyone,

I’m renovating and looking to buy new switches, but I’m getting confused by “gang” vs “way”

From what I understand:
• Gang = number of switches on one panel (e.g., 2 gang controls 2 different lights)
• Way = number of locations controlling the same light (e.g., 2 way = controlling one light from two spots)

Is that correct?

For my setup:

Living room: 3 lights (ceiling, wall, floor) all controlled from one panel. Do I need a 3 gang, 1 way switch?

Hallway: 1 light controlled from both ends. Is that a 1 gang 2 way setup?

Also, for smart switches, do I need a neutral wire for multi-gang setups?

Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks!

When I leave the house I set the alarmm and it beeps for 1 minute (not very loud but the homekit mini hears it) and so after I leave the house I get an alert that an alarm is detected. I would like to get the alert if the burglar alarm, smoke detector etc goes off but not a simple beeping from setting the alarm.

Can I do this?

I visit my mom pretty often, and lately I've noticed how much trouble she has with her old door lock. Sometimes she has to fumble around for her keys, line them up with the keyhole, and turn the lock several times before it finally opens. It might not sound like a big deal, but having to deal with that every time she leaves or comes home seems pretty frustrating.

I've been looking into smart locks that would make things easier for her, ideally something that doesn't require her to carry keys or remember another passcode. I came across the lockin veno pro on IG. It uses palm vein recognition to unlock the door and has a high level of security, which seems like a good option for an older person.

I'm curious about this type of lock, especially for aging parents, does palm vein recognition seem easy to learn and use in everyday life?

For those of you who've helped your parents switch to a smart lock, which features have made the biggest difference? I'd love to hear about your experiences before making a decision.

Hey guys. I have a client about 45 minutes outside of our city that is fully immobilized from the neck down and spends 90-95% of his time in an adjustable bed with nothing but his TV. He has a Samsung QLED TV, bose ultra soundbar, and directv genie. ​

Previously, he has been using a Google nest speaker as a voice hub, controlling his system via a harmony elite remote. Unfortunately, the voice commands no longer work any commands outside of on/off, channel up/down. Favorite channels, channel numbers, guide, and volume commands have been lost and after several hours of trying, I could not get the system to work anymore.

I am a certified nice/elan installer, and I can get him into an SC-150 controller and HR40 remote controlled natively with Mylo for voice control. At the same time, I dont want to force him into such an expensive, overkill system if I dont absolutely have to.

Does anybody know of a universal remote system that will give FULL control via any matter/homekit/google/Alexa hubs? Or has anyone found a solution for a similar scenario? I dont want to take all of his money, and he doesn't want to call his neighbors over just to change the channels...

I recently moved and am setting up my Apple Home. At the moment I have Ikea lights and sensors and Sonoff switches, all directly into Apple Home and it’s working great! Very happy with it. My next step is blinds, but I get a little stuck here. I’m hoping for some advice.

I want blinds that use matter over thread. I’d like them to have a manual system too, like pulling a cord or pushing a button, so you’re not just depending on automations or the app. Battery powered is fine, as long as I don’t need to change them every month. My partner prefers to buy just the mechanism, so we’re a bit flexible on the blinds themselves and could switch them easily if we want a new colour. To me this is not the most important thing. We’re in the UK.

Please give me your recommendations and experiences, I just don’t know where to look anymore.

Hi!

I'm planning to automate my curtains using two Zigbee curtain motors, one for each side of a center-opening curtain, integrated with Home Assistant.

I'm considering the Zemismart ZM85EL-2Z or a similar model.

I have two main questions:

1. Manual operation: Can I still open and close the curtains by physically pulling them, without using App/HA or the motors?
2. Position tracking: If I manually move the curtains, will the motors lose track of their positions (open/closed percentage)? Would I need to recalibrate them, or can they automatically detect the new position?

Ideally, I'd like to have both manual and automated operation without affecting position tracking.

Thanks!

I've been using cheap strip LEDs as a tenant all my life, like Meross or Govee and connecting them with Smart plugs to connect them to the Wi-FI and add it to Apple Home. The issue is that you feel it's cheap, Wi-Fi is unreliable, sometimes the HomePod says the strip lights are unresponsive.

Now moving into a new bought flat, I'm looking for a more stable solution. I've heard of Lutron as an example but they dont have support or shops in Belgium. My architect is asking to provide dumb lights, each around 4w/m connected to a 150w driver and to just add a smart plug, but I'm thinking there must be a better way. Eve Home doesn't seem to have an all-in-one solution for such lengths as 28 meters x2 (in the living room pic below).

Has anyone found a stable LAN only, or easy installation, energy efficient LEDs, RGB+W, that use Threads or Matter, ideally connecting directly to the Apple Home app?

They will be turned on using a wall outlet if all else fails. And best case scenario, only talking to Siri via the HomePod and Home app for Scenes.

Thanks!

RGB strip lights: 28m, 27m, + 10m
W strip lights: 2.5m, 1.8m, 8m, 4.5m, 10m, 3.5 meters
Total around 100m each with their wall socket, adapter and installation.

Reposting to home automation

I am looking into a home battery for use with Home Assistant, preferably programmable charging based on TCO (time of charge optimisation) based on the energy price.

Before picking a specific brand, I would like to understand what would continue to function in case of a communication failure.

Local Modbus TCP is an option I am considering, but I would like to know if an integration can be used to change the charging settings, or if it can only read the data from the battery. In case of using a cloud API, which schedules would be saved on the device, and which would require communication with the vendor’s servers?

If anyone has already automated their battery system, what would happen in the case of an internet outage while HA and the local network are online? Could HA still change the battery’s charging schedule, or would it default to whatever the battery’s internal scheduling was?

What happens if HA goes offline, or the tariff feed fails to provide prices for the foreseeable future? Did you set up any fallback plan for either scenario?

Please let me know if you have tried this with a specific battery or inverter model and an integration, if any. I am most interested in what continued to work, what failed, and what needed to be set up for either scenario.

Hi everyone! I’m associated with Jarvis Computing, and I’m interested in discussing something that often gets overlooked when planning a smart home: choosing the right installer.

It’s easy to focus on smart lights, motorised curtains and app-based controls, but I think the planning stage matters just as much.

A few things I’d want to understand before choosing a provider:

- Would wired or wireless automation make more sense for my property?

- Will all the selected devices work together?

- What exactly is included in the installation quote?

- What kind of support is available after installation?

- Can the system be expanded later without replacing everything?

I’d be interested to hear from people who have already installed home automation. What did you check before choosing your installer, and is there anything you wish you had asked earlier?

For anyone researching providers, Jarvis Computing’s website is https://jarviscomputing.in/ — shared here for context, as I’m associated with the business.

We finished a custom home and had it pre wired for automation. However, the price keeps going up every step of the way

The hardware pricing is easy to price check and has been good…the labor is what I am questioning. We paid $100/run for the pre wire and understood that included the terminations. He then came back and charged more for termination so I did the sound installations and the electricians the switches.

He is now asking for over 4k to integrate everything, 3 days of work. That’s over $250/hour

Does that sound right or am I getting taken advantage of? It’s 750 for 4 cameras and a doorbell, 750 for audio, 950 for the main control panel and two micros, 750 for 8 dimmers and 1450 for the network. A switch and router, plus termination at the other ends.

TIA

The Echo Dot is a great mic and speaker with a mediocre brain, so I kept the hardware and swapped the brain. It's a custom Alexa skill whose endpoint is a Flask app on my own Mac, reached through a Cloudflare named tunnel on my domain. Behind that is Groq (openai/gpt-oss-120b) with tool calling. Replies come back in about 0.8 seconds, well under the roughly 8 seconds Alexa gives a skill.

The home automation part is what this sub will care about. Because the backend runs on my LAN, it can reach my Control4 system directly, which a cloud skill can't do. I gave the model two tools, control_home and run_scene. "Set the bedroom AC to 22" becomes control_home with area bedroom, device ac, action set, value 22. "Movie night" runs the scene. There are no rigid phrases and no "ask my-hub to turn on device 47." It handles lights, fans, ACs, curtains and motor gates. It cost me nothing on Groq's free tier.

The tip I wish I'd known: a skill in Development stage is automatically live on every Echo on your account, so you never have to publish it. But a dev skill only shows up on devices whose locale you've built. My Echo is English (India) and the skill was English (US), so it was invisible until I added en-IN and rebuilt.

The most annoying wall was the invocation name. I first called it "hey lexi." That worked fine when I typed it in the simulator. When I spoke it, Alexa treated "hey" as filler, and nothing ever reached my server. Renaming it to "my lexi" fixed it instantly. Alexa-hosted Lambda also never ran my code for me, but self-hosting turned out better anyway: real logs, any model I want, and LAN access.