Hello everyone!

Kiosk Satellite now fully supports the Echo Dot (2nd generation) with LineageOS 14.1. The Dot has no screen so Kiosk Satellite runs in a new headless mode: Voice Satellite, intercom, alarms, timers are all fully functional, set up and managed entirely from the remote admin.

What works

• Voice Satellite with local wake word detection (including vsWakeWord), Assist pipelines, realtime conversations, timers and wake word arbitration with your other kiosks.
• Intercom calls, hands-free, answered and ended with the Action button.
• Alarms and timers, with the light ring showing what's ringing.
• Music through the Sendspin player and the DLNA renderer (audio only).
• ESPHome, Bluetooth Proxy, Fleet Management and plugins that don't need a screen.

Headless mode

Kiosk Satellite runs 100% headless on the Echo Dot. It never draws a screen or loads a WebView, dashboard, screensaver or camera. The remote admin leaves out every page and control that needs a screen. The setup wizard only asks for what the Dot uses and ESPHome leaves out the screen and camera entities.

Buttons

• Action answers a ringing intercom call, stops a ringing alarm, dismisses a timer or the voice turn, or ends a call. Otherwise it starts a voice command. A new Button gesture maps a press, a double press or a hold to any gesture action.
• Microphone mutes Voice Satellite. The mute follows the Dot's own microphone mute both ways, so the button, the VS Mute switch in Home Assistant and the remote admin always agree.
• Volume buttons work as usual.

Light ring

The new LED Control page controls the light ring on the Echo Dot: listening, thinking, speaking, timers, alarms, intercom calls, notifications and the microphone mute. Each has its own switch, brightness and colors and there's an optional idle look.

Getting started

1. Flash the full cm_biscuit-userdebug image of the CM14.1 port for Amazon Biscuit.
2. Install the Kiosk Satellite APK and start it once over adb.
3. Grant the permissions and the button service over adb, then reboot. The guide has the exact commands.
4. Open http://<dot ip>:2324 and follow the setup wizard, then add the Dot in Home Assistant, where it shows up as discovered.

The full guide is here: Echo Dot.

If you have a Dot lying around, give the latest version a try and let me know how it goes.

You might have seen Wes Bos's home dashboard project. It made me finally move everything into Home Assistant and get rid of the paper calendars that have been stuck to our fridge with magnets for years.

I called it Frame. It's a YAML dashboard that runs full screen on an old 12.9" iPad Pro (1st gen, stuck on iPadOS 16) hanging on our wall. It shows:

• Clock, weather and our agenda for the day
• A calendar with drag & drop, repeating events and drive times from Waze
• House: lights, blinds, the front door, and appliances while they're running
• Garden: the robot mower, watering and garden to-dos
• Camera views, energy and network stats
• A photo slideshow from a shared Google Photos album (WallPanel)
• A night mode for when the house goes dark, which also dims the screen to 5%

The small things that excite me the most
When a plane actually flies over our house (Flightradar24, 5 km radius), one crosses the screen in the same direction and at the same offset as the real one. Jets, small planes and helicopters each have their own sprite, and jets leave contrails. Tap the plane's tag and you get a flight card with the route, progress, delay, aircraft and altitude, and you ride along behind it through the clouds. Now we all stop and look up whenever one goes by. ✈️

→ Video of the view is here: https://youtu.be/acHyAmHCnsA

Tapping a device opens its own detail sheet instead of HA's standard more-info dialog. The layout also works on a phone.

Under the hood
Built on button-card, layout-card, kiosk-mode and WallPanel, plus a fair amount of custom JS and CSS. It runs on an Odroid N2+ with 64 GB eMMC. Claude Opus 5.5 was my best friend through the whole build, from the button-card templates to measuring layout quirks on the iPad itself. Getting all of this to run smoothly on a 2015 iPad was half the fun.

Thanks for the inspiration, Wes ✌️
Happy to answer questions or share parts of the config.

^{the contents of the dashboard are fake, some names are correct, but claude created a puppeteer script with fake data, to create these screenshot.}

Being out in the country, I get the odd mouse 🐭 in the house. Thankfully, they have been restricted to the basement (strangely quite rarely), and the attic crawl space (much more common).

The only access to the attic is by ladder, and my old ass was getting tired of climbing up that ladder daily to check if the traps had gone off.

And if you forget to check for a few days.... You might end up smelling the result.

So. I picked up some highly sensitive ZigBee vibration sensors. These things are great. Battery lasts for quite a while depending on how often they go off.

They are just little white discs. I needed a way to attach them to the depressed arm on a mouse trap... And I also wanted to keep them from landing on a squished mouse and also not launched halfway across the attic if they were just taped or hot glued onto a trap.

So I designed a little case and printed it with my 3D printer, with a threaded cap, and a tie off section.

Sensor in case. Cap threaded on. Tied securely to the mouse trap with the slack taken up.

Now when the trap goes off.... My phone gets the notification in the screenshot below along with the funeral march song playing 🤣😜

And my dining room table lights will flash on and off for a while too until I acknowledge the message.

Damn right. I don't fuck around 😁

I’m designing a small desktop audio hub and exploring whether Home Assistant integration would make it more useful. I’d love to hear from people who already control parts of their home from their desk.

The idea started with my own desk setup: I work from home, play games, and listen to music, and I wanted to bring a few everyday audio controls into one device.

The concept has three main parts:

• An audio base: A DAC/headphone amp with powered speaker output and a dedicated button to switch between headphones and speakers.
• A built-in microphone array: To reduce the need for a separate microphone taking up desk space.
• A detachable ESP32-based dial with a display: It would handle volume and desktop status information while docked, charge automatically, and work as a wireless controller when detached.

Its main home would still be the desk. But since there would already be a programmable dial within reach, I’m curious whether it would be useful for controlling things around the desk, too.

For example, you could switch from adjusting audio volume to dimming your office lights, activate a work or gaming scene, or check room temperature and air quality on the display. These are possibilities I’m considering, rather than features that are already implemented.

I’m planning to open-source the controller’s firmware, UI, and hardware schematics so people can customize the controls and display. I haven’t settled on how Home Assistant integration would work yet.

A few things I’d love your input on it.

My 150 year old house tests me ... and so does Fred, our permanent resident. Since he was constantly closing doors, passing wind, and hiding socks, I figured I'd give him a job. Besides, I was tired of my Homepage dashboard and was looking for something a little more.

Fred now keeps an eye on the entire house. He tracks who's where, manages lighting and routines, watches the cameras, sensors, network, and servers, and tries to figure out what's wrong before I have to go digging for answers.

It's still evolving, but so far Fred is a better sysadmin than he is as a houseguest.

And I still can't find my socks.

New release of EspControl, v2.13.0. Big improvements for card customization, and new weather cards that support forecasts...

• Weather: Added forecasts for up to eight days, layouts that adapt to card size, and tap-to-open rain and wind details.
• PIN protection: Require a PIN after waking or manually locking the touchscreen, with an optional shuffled keypad.
• Animated images: GIFs now play in camera cards, useful for radar loops (P4 only).

• Card colours: Choose custom backgrounds and separate active colours, with quick right-click colour changes.
• Card editing: Resize cards by dragging a corner and rename them by clicking their titles.
• Soft curve corners: Choose Small, Medium, or Large corner curves, with matching previews and clearer selection outlines.
• Screensaver: Added a card to start it immediately and an optional date beneath the clock.

EspControl supports a range of screens from the cheap but great £20 S3 4inch screen, to P4 based 4inch, 7inch and 10inch screens. All feedback welcome! If you spot any issues, please just drop me note on the GitHub issues and I’ll take a look. Thanks!

Hey all!

Been spending way too many evenings on this one... but I think it finally got to a point where I'm happy enough to share it ;)

The goal was simple: everything in one place, but with the same look and feel on every page, both on desktop and mobile. So it's all built on custom:button-card templates + card-mod, with a small "design system" behind it (same corner radius everywhere, same font sizes, same colours for the same states).

What's in there:

• Home: chips on top for the main stuff (power, solar, doors, alarm, internet), small alert pills that only show up when something needs attention (low batteries, offline devices, failing integrations...), and a line for running appliances with time left. Then people, security + cameras, doors & sensors, calendar, rooms, weather, car and music.
• Room pop-ups: lights, scenes, comfort, windows, AC/thermostat and media, all in one place.
• Climate: both ACs, Netatmo and temp/humidity per room with 24h graphs.
• Energy: costs and savings, gas and water from the invoices.
• Solar: inverter, strings, optimizers, power meter and today's production vs forecast.
• Equipment: dishwasher, washer and dryer with loads and cost per cycle, the ACs and the 3D printer.
• Appliances: 2 robot vacuums, projector screen, blinds and leak sensors.
• Car: battery and fuel, home charger with current limits, and charging by location.
• IT & Network: NUC, NAS, Wifi mesh, AdGuard and the printer.
• System: several counter, failing integrations, offline devices, lowest batteries and Zigbee/Thread health.
• And of course, an F1 page with loads of info and (that comes on the next race), live timing, and control details. All from F1 Sensor.

Main custom cards designed with: button-card, card-mod, apexcharts-card, mini-graph-card, aarlo-glance and formulaone-card.

Still a work in progress (it always is, right?!), so feedback and ideas are more than welcome.

(Names, places and cameras are blurred, sorry for that ;))

Built a robot vacuum garage on the side of the island. The door opens based on the cleaning schedule and closes once cleaning is completed. A 12V linear actuator is used for the flap movement. Added WS2815 strip for some visual indicators on actuator and robot status. Everything is controlled using an esp32C3 and managed in home assistant.

(sparky is coming in the next few weeks to wire it in properly so there is no giant USB cable running down the wall

Ciao a tutti, greetings from Italy! 🇮🇹
I wanted to share my latest home automation project with you all.
I’ve been using Home Assistant since 2024, and recently I replaced my old lighting control system with a smart setup based on Shelly Dimmer Gen4 devices. Each light point has its own Gen4, and the dimmer outputs are managed through Home Assistant automations.
The project I’d like to share with you today is about giving a second life to an old Lenovo C260 All-in-One touchscreen PC, turning it into a dedicated HMI for my smart home.
Here’s how it works:
Touchscreen interface: The Lenovo boots directly into Chromium, displaying my main Home Assistant dashboard and acting as a dedicated control panel.
Smart lighting: Each light point is equipped with a Shelly Dimmer Gen4, with the lighting logic and automations handled by Home Assistant.
Boiler control: An integrated ESP32-H2 manages the boiler.
Environmental monitoring: I’ve also integrated light and temperature sensors.
Automatic screen wake-up: A microwave radar sensor detects when someone walks in front of the panel or comes within its proximity, waking up the display automatically.
The dashboards are still in beta, so there’s definitely room for improvement. I’m very open to suggestions, especially regarding UI/UX, dashboard layout, and how to make the interface more intuitive and practical for everyday use.
If anyone is interested, I can also share pictures of the inside of the bezel and how all the components are fitted together.
Thanks for checking out my project, and I’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions!
Un saluto dall’Italia!

Same features/installer from echo dot gen 2, and many more, now w/ support for:

• Echo Show 5 (1st gen): checkers
• Echo Show 5 (2nd gen): cronos
• Echo Show 8 (1st gen): crown
• Coming Soon: Echo Show 8 (2nd gen): athena

still pretty early but is pretty functional.

https://github.com/ygelfand/echolocal

Hi everyone! I've been following this subreddit for a while and got a lot of inspiration from your amazing projects!

I started my Home Assistant journey with a Raspberry Pi 4 2GB, a thread donglea and some IKEA lights and sensors. Everything worked great, but I was still using Google Home for voice commands.

I also had a Dell desktop running Jellyfin as a media server, which I could turn on and off through HA.

Then I discovered Echo Muse here on Reddit and decided to give it a try. I bought two Echo 2nd gen, modded and connected them to HA. The Raspberry couldn't handle voice processing and kept crashing, so I moved everything to my Dell Vostro 3268 (i5-7400 8GB RAM), which now runs both HA and Jellyfin (with Docker)

The problem is that voice control is still pretty disappointing. The echos randomly activate, often misunderstand commands, and overall work much worse than my Google home.

I'm guessing it's a configuration issue, but I'm not sure where to start.

Has anyone managed to get Echo Muse working reliably? Any recommendations for wake word detection or general optimisations? Or is my hardware simply not powerful enough?

Thanks for any advice!

Hey everyone! This is the first custom card I've ever put out there, so go easy on me 🙂
Okay, "card" is a bit of a stretch. Technically it's a Lovelace card, you add it like any other. But you never actually see it. It just sits there and quietly turns the whole dashboard background into a live sky that changes with the weather outside. Sunny, rain, storm, snow, clear night with stars - the background follows along. Think Apple Weather, but behind your HA dashboard.
HA Weather Dynamic Background.
What it does

• The sky follows the sun's elevation, so dawn, midday, dusk and night each get their own colors
• Clouds, rain, snow, hail, lightning, stars and the moon, all drawn on a canvas
• It looks at cloud coverage and wind too, not only the weather state
• Built-in hysteresis, so it won't flicker when the forecast keeps flipping between two states
• Settings are per device (on/off, animation mode, quality).
• Honors prefers-reduced-motion and prefers-reduced-transparency
• If your device starts struggling, it drops the particle count on its own
• Two CSS variables, --wbg-sky-dark and --wbg-sky-light, let your theme tweak card glass/opacity depending on how bright the sky is
• UI in English and Polish, picked from your HA language
• One JS file, zero dependencies

Install (HACS)

1. HACS → ⋮ → Custom repositories
2. Add https://github.com/michaldyr/ha-weather-dynamic-background-card as type Dashboard
3. Download it and refresh your browser
4. Drop the HA Weather Dynamic Background card into any view where you want the sky. Everything's configured in the card editor.

Honest note: I vibe-coded this with AI. The idea and the look are mine, and I’ve been running it on my own dashboard (a custom iOS-style theme + Bubble Card). The screenshots in the repo are AI-generated too, so they show the idea rather than exact captures from my setup. I’m not any kind of developer, so if you’ve got ideas for changes or spot something that could be done better, feel free to jump in on GitHub: open an issue, fork it, send a PR, whatever works for you. I’d especially love to hear from people running different themes and devices.

Has anybody found a outside Temperature and Humidity sensor with Matter over Thread? No Zigbee, I like to stay on the Thread network.

Hey everyone 👋
Just wanted to share a little side project. It’s very much a beta and I’m not planning to publish it, but I’m curious what you think of the idea.
I’ve been deep in the Apple ecosystem for years, and my whole family is used to Apple Home. But I didn’t like feeling locked in. I wanted the freedom to step away from Apple someday without changing all our habits. So I made Home Assistant the real brain of the house, and built a native iPhone app that looks and feels like Apple Home but talks straight to Home Assistant. Same experience for us, but nothing depends on HomeKit anymore.
I also see a big advantage in a dedicated app over building yet another Home Assistant dashboard. It feels truly native: smooth, instant, with real iOS gestures and haptics, no web page loading. My family just gets a clean, simple home app, while all the complicated stuff stays behind the scenes. And I’m not spending evenings tweaking cards and YAML.
What it does so far:
Same tiles, rooms and layout we had in Apple Home, so my wife didn’t have to relearn anything 😄
The layout lives in Home Assistant, so I can rearrange things without rebuilding the app
Way more icons and colours than Apple Home
Controls for lights, heating, gates, alarm, vacuum, AC…
Short video below. Has anyone else tried escaping a platform this way? Would love to hear your thoughts!

We just switched from a Power Pet Door to a Pawport and I missed having the door in Home Assistant, so I built an integration for it: https://github.com/com6056/ha-pawport

You can lock and unlock it, hold it open, control the lights (brightness and color), change its settings, and see each pet's trips and time outside for the day. For now you add it to HACS as a custom repository (I've submitted it to the default list too), and it needs HA 2026.10 or newer.

It's unofficial and cloud based (same API the app uses), and it's only been tested on my door, so let me know if anything's off or if you've got questions!

I use a SLZB-06 and for the most part its been great and really solid.

Recently I've noticed my IKEA button in my office has taken a few presses to respond (sometimes it never does)...battery levels are fine.

I am now attempting to pair a spare SOMRIG button from my office and its really iffy, fails interviews etc...previously adding devices from this part of my flat has been fine.

Additionally I am seeing devices in my bedroom (further away than my office) have a better LQI and button presses etc are instant, never had issues.

The only thing I have recently done is replace some normal light switches with SONOFF ones, these are registered as an End Device so I dont think its screwed with routing.

Bit stumped honestly because I dont exactly have a massive flat and yet I am seeing my LQI pretty low all over the place, even with devices in the same room as my SLZB-06.

Any ideas?

Hi,

I just saw that camera on sale for less than 60€ and wonder if someone has real life experience with the device yet?

I mostly found reviews that smelled like ads or just cover the absolute basics with the native app.

My idea would be to use it with PoE so adding a PoE to 12V extractor and not using WiFi. Then block it from internet access and local only on HA dashboard.

I read that Onvif just gives the SD resolution streams and not HD, while that is only available via rtsp but that gives no PTZ and audio?

The ZigBee function seems to be able to be a router, does that work with z2m and a zstack adapter? EDIT: Just found a FB post that it works as a router with z2m and zha.

What is your overall experience? In one video the stream seemed to be delayed more than usual but could be that guys setup.

Thanks.

I’m interested in hearing how folks decided between Homey Pro and Home Assistant.

I’ve been a basic smart home user for a while. Now, I’m looking to integrate all of my accessories into one app - ultimately, I would like to get everything into HomeKit.

Homey looks like it may be easier. What are the opinions on this?

Does one work better with HomeKit than the other?

Any other pros and cons?