We just bought a house and are planning some renovations. We want to take down the old blinds and replace them with motorized ones.

The main thing I’m stuck on is whether to open up the walls and run cables for PoE shades. The wiring quote is within our budget, but I’m not sure how much difference it would make compared with battery-powered shades in everyday use.

I’ve seen SmartWings recommended quite a bit here, so they’re on my list. Are their PoE shades worth doing the extra wiring for, or would battery powered ones be enough?

Thanks for the advice!

I just moved into a new place, and a lot of my devices are connected to the internet. But the front door lock is the one thing I don't want to depend on the cloud for.

Cloud services can raise prices, get discontinued, or go down unexpectedly. I can live with my lights not working, but I can't risk being locked out of my own home.

I'm still using a regular keyed lock right now, but I'm planning to switch to a smart lock. I'm currently looking at the lockin veno series. Ideally, I want unlocking, access logs, and alarms to work locally as much as possible, without relying on a cloud platform. I'm torn between the Pro and Plus. Both of them have person and package detection features, but the Pro version has more local storage capacity.

My family is coming to stay with me starting the day after tomorrow, so I'd like to get this sorted out soon. I'd appreciate any advice!

Hi everyone, I am looking for smart blinds for this bow window. There are six segments. The left and right most segments are around 19 inches and are casement-style window. The middle four are fixed panes of glass, and these are around 20 inches in width. There is at least 3.5 inches of space between each segment (the window jambs where they are next to each other). The angle between segments is about 165 degrees.

What do you recommend for blinds or what have you had success with for bow windows? I have some cellular shades from SmartWings but those are almost two inches depth. This bow window faces west and faces out onto a cul de sac street. I was thinking top-down bottom-up cellular shades so I have have the top half open so people don't see in the evening. Alternatively, venetian-style blinds, roller blinds.

Thanks!

Greetings all. I have done quite a bit of research and I can't figure out how to fix my problem with Homekit. Does anyone have a suggestion for me?

I originally set up a homekit home for my daughter in her attached apartment. Worked great. Set up lots of scenes and automations. Now that I am setting up a homekit home for my main house, I can't get Siri to know which home I want to control.

Each home has it's own Homekit hub and it's own Caseta hub but we have a shared network and physical location. I have tried selecting the correct home in the home app but that has no effect. Everything keeps defaulting to

I'm trying to avoid having to specify the "home" with every command through Siri which is necessary when each home has common room names (kitchen, dining, etc.)

Thanks.

https://makerworld.com/ru/models/3461193-home-assistant-voice-pe-enclosure-with-clock#profileId-3949533

I made a custom case for Home Assistant Voice PE with a bigger speaker and an MAX7219 LED clock!

The project also includes custom ESPHome firmware with support for custom voice commands, timers, alarms, baby monitoring, and calls between speakers.

Check it out on MakerWorld!

I’ve been trying to figure out a digital calendar setup that would be able to display (at minimum) the mock design I’m attaching here. It would need to pull in local weather, meal plans, and multiple people’s calendars in one view. I think the skylight calendar may get me the closest, but does anyone have advice on how I could build this view? My family’s schedule will thank you

I've been working on getting my Roku Smart Home color bulbs (BC1000X / RK_BA19C) working locally with Home Assistant, and finally got it working.

Turns out these bulbs have a Wyze-compatible HTTP API listening on port 88. The commands are encrypted using a per-device key (enr) that can be extracted from the Roku Smart Home app's network traffic.

Once you have that key, you can send commands directly over LAN without relying on Roku's cloud.

I put together a Python implementation and an MQTT bridge for Home Assistant that supports on/off, brightness, RGB color, and color temperature. It also works with my Roku light strip.

The main limitation right now is that state reporting is optimistic, since I haven't gotten local state queries working.

I cleaned up the code and documentation and made the project public in case anyone else has been trying to integrate these bulbs.

GitHub: https://github.com/JEFF7712/roku-bulb-local

I did use AI coding agents to help do this.

I've been developing ESP32 Tailnet Gateway, an open-source ESP32-S3 firmware combining network connectivity, monitoring and home automation features.

One use case is connecting an IoT device to an MQTT broker at another location through Tailscale/Headscale, without installing a VPN client on the IoT device.

It also offers:

• MQTT and Home Assistant Discovery.
• Wake-on-LAN with reachability checks.
• Device and service monitoring.
• ntfy, Telegram and email alerts.
• Persistent event history.
• Optional subnet routing.

The gateway can continue operating independently of Home Assistant or the NAS it monitors, as long as its power and network connectivity remain available.

GitHub: https://github.com/Mattboxx/esp32-tailnet-gateway

Screenshots: https://mattboxx.github.io/esp32-tailnet-gateway/screenshots/

Built on existing ESP32 networking projects.

What ESP32-based monitoring or recovery features would be most useful in your home automation setup?

My old printed holders for the Hue motion sensors never sat right in the ceiling, so I designed a recessed mount that works like a GU10 spot gimbal.

• Fits an 83 to 84 mm hole in drywall (9.5 to 25 mm boards)
• 3 printed parts: mounting ring with spring arms, ball with a pocket for the sensor, clamp ring
• The spring arms pull the 100 mm flange tight against the ceiling, no screws or glue
• The ball tilts about 15 degrees each way and rotates, and stays where you aim it
• Printed in PETG without supports, about 1.5 h and 47 g for a set
• Battery change: pull the whole unit down, swap the batteries, push it back in. The aiming stays

Made for the indoor sensor (the square 55 mm one). Happy to answer questions.

Home automation.

Main pc. Lg OLED55CS6LA smart tv

AMD Ryzen 5 5600

Gigabyte B550M K Micro ATX AM4 Motherboard.

Samsung 990 EVO Plus 2 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 5.0 X2 NVME Solid State Drive.

SilverStone SST-GD06B - Grandia

MSI MAG A650BN 650 W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply.

MSI SHADOW 2X OC GeForce RTX 5060 8 GB.

ADATA XPG GAMMIX D10 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3200

TP-Link Archer TXE75E AXE5400 WiFi 6E WiFi Card PCIe WiFi Card

Storage external 10tb CMR HDD

Looking for micro pc for always on state. Local stored library must be accessible 24/7.

Frontend for library is kodi so micro pc must allow 4k playback and scrape artwork flawlessly.

Currently trying to set up virtualbox with home assistant to use with smart devices which will be automation frontend. This is all very clunky and user friendly at all IMO, looking for a system that is easy to use.

User friendly and low running costs is priority alongside performance and value for money and at least future proof for 5 years and once i get some sort of grip on it i will upgrade the hardware if needed

Budget ideally no more than £500 as bulbs and switches all add up.

Not really got a clue on this anything else i am missing or need to read up on?

Cheers

Portable in the sense i dont have to rely on my homeautomation and can bring it to other houses. Right now, I have to physically press the button to trigger the fog. I haven't been able to find any aftermarket products for this except for 3-pin circular connectors. Remote control is the main priority, but making it smarter (like setting automated burst intervals) would be awesome. It’s definitely a budget machine, but since I got it for free, it’s worth a fun project!

I hope this is the right sub for this question. The plumbing subs are said this wasn't a question for them. I need an alarm on my basement sewage pump that is LOUD, like wake the dead loud. It needs to trigger if the power goes out or the float switch in the basin closes.

The pump is tucked away in the back part of the basement in a rambler style house. It needs to be loud enough to wake me in the middle of the night. It has a Zoeller APak Indoor Alarm (p/n 153924-B) which would be great, but it's little meep of an alarm is a joke. And, it doesn't have a dry contact.

My thinking goes like this:

1. Sewage pumps GFCI trips and nobody in the house knows about it and the basin floods the finished basement. yuk The alarm would make me aware of the problem with ample time to fix it before anything bad happens.
2. Pump stops pumping for some reason. The float switch will close and I'll still have time to fix it.

The budget is what ever it takes to get a reliable alarm in place.

Just wondering if anyone is running two Refoss Home Energy Monitors (EM16). I have a lot of circuit breakers in my panel and I was thinking about getting a second EM16 so I can monitor all the breakers.

How does reporting work with more than one EM16? Does HA report them separately or can you combine them into one report? What have you found to be the pro's and con's of running two EM16's?

Any thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated.

My mum is a pensioner and has a number of roller blinds around the place. Some of them are hard to reach. I was wondering if anyone has used these motors for opening and closing otherwise manual blinds. Are they any good? Any particular issues with them? Would love to set her up with some smart buttons and maybe some automations for opening and closing the blinds.

Hi

I've been looking at Pix-Star frames and frames with Frameo software.

One the one hand, Pix-Star has a remote (no touch screen), no subscriptions, radio, and free cloud for life? And at the time of this post, the app is a bit older looking and hasn't updated since 2024 in the Play Store.

The Frameo frames have a touchscreen, more modern and featured app it looks like, free with limitations or cheap? subscription at $2 a month, a new calendar, cloud is with paid subscription (more secure?).

The Pix-Star look a bit pricier as at 10.1 inches they're like $150 while Frameo is about $60-70.

Pix-Star has expand able storage and so do some/most Frameos. The Pix-Star is its own brand while the Frameo is software attached to various frames.

Both have their pros and cons but not sure if one is clearly better made, better gift, or easier to use than the other.

As title really - I've got two zones, I want to turn them on/off and dim them separately but always want them the same colour temperature using a third pot, is this doable?