Saw this on Instagram, and figured I'd share here. As someone who now owns a 3D printer, a few ESP32 boards, and with the help of AI... it's pretty much possible to create all sorts of smart home devices now! Hopefully this inspires others to try cool new ideas with existing devices.

Link to original Instagram post.

Hey everyone!

I'm currently building a house and want to integrate smart home features from the start, while the electrical installation is still being planned (I'm based in Europe).

I'd love to hear your recommendations, especially regarding:

– Lighting: Which smart GU10 bulbs would you recommend? What about dimmers and LED strips? Ideally, I'd prefer to use the same brand for all lighting (currently using Tapo lights).

– Night lights: What's the best solution for hallways and bathrooms? Motion-activated lights, plug-in night lights, or something else?

– Switches: Smart switches or Shelly relays?

– Ecosystem: I already use Home Assistant (on a Raspberry Pi) and Google Home. I also have a separate custom PC running Unraid.

– Connectivity: I prefer Zigbee (mainly due to the cost of the devices) or Wi-Fi.

– Smart plugs: I'd prefer to stick to one brand for all plugs (currently using Tapo P100 and P110).

– Smart speakers: Which ones would you recommend for voice control and Home Assistant integration?

– Other features: Smart sensors and anything else worth considering.

My goal is to have a reliable, future-proof smart home system from the start.

What would you recommend installing or preparing during construction? Anything you wish you'd done differently?

Thanks!

I have a sunbeam electric blanket. It auto shuts off after 10 hrs. It has a typical button on top. 5 levels of heat. You push the button to turn on. Same button to turn up fhe heat levels. One level up per push. A simple on/off plug switch doesnt turn the device back on as it does not retain state.

Any suggestions for a device i can affix to the control to push the button 3x in the evening to pre warm my bed?

I have an older Govee smart heater that I can turn on via wifi. I'm looking for a second smart heater for av second room.

The Govee heater was discontinued. I purchased a Dyson and a Lasko.

Both could be controlled by apps (heat up and down) by couldn't be turned on by the app. Maybe be a safety thing?

Yes, I could get a dumb heater and smart plug but that's myth last resort.

Which heaters can be turned on by an app?

Any recommendations for a smart curtain system that works with Google Home?

I’m looking to make my bedroom blackout and have the curtains automatically open a few minutes before my alarm. Ideally I’d like a motor/system that can work with pretty much any curtains or drapes I buy from Amazon, so if I move and need a different size I can just swap the fabric without replacing the whole setup.

Anyone have experience with something like this?

We have a Tapo cam in the kids' room, and all I wanted was for it to pop up in the corner of the TV when something moves, then go away without checking the Tapo app on my phone or pausing the show.

Everything I found needed something in the middle:

• QuickBars, HA TV Dashboard and PiPup all do the popup and look great, but they need Home Assistant running somewhere. I don't have HA and didn't want to set up a server just for this.
• tinyCam is a great viewer, but to catch motion on the TV it has to decode the feed all day.
• Ring and Nest do it, but only for their own cameras, through their cloud, on certain TVs.

So I built CamPop. It runs on the Android TV and listens on local network for the camera's motion events. No hub, no server, no cloud, no account. Also built a companion phone app for setup, so you're not typing passwords with a remote.

I tested it mostly with Tapo cams but it should work with any that support ONVIF (Tapo, Reolink, Hikvision, Dahua, Amcrest, ANNKE, Foscam, Axis, Bosch or any other that have the support).

I'm looking for some folks to use it for two weeks and tell me what breaks.

1. ⁠Join the tester group: https://groups.google.com/g/campop-testers
2. ⁠Opt in: https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.monkapproves.campop
3. ​Install app on your Android TV (and optionally on phone for companion app): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.monkapproves.campop

I want to add some lamps to my bedroom but turning them on and off one by one is inconvenient. Therefore I’m looking for a way to simultaneously turn all of them on and off. I’ve found that answer pretty easily. Get some matter smart bulbs and connect them with a matter remote. Now the small issue is I want to remotes that control all the bulbs simultaneously. One remote I can keep next to the light switch for entering and leaving the room and one on my night stand so I don’t have to get up after I’m prepared for bed.

What way would you go about doing this?
Do you have a recommendation on the specific products?
Should I use a different program other than matter?

Thanks!

I think mine is that my bathroom fart fan is controlled by over 900 lines of code.

I need new thermostats for electrical floor heating and this one was suggested by the electrician. I don’t have any Plejd but I have a lot of Zigbee and wifi stuff.

I understand that Shelly in general have better interfaces, like better support for WiFi, zigbee etc but I don’t know if they have any good thermostat.

Would this Plejd unit combined with their Plejd hub integrate good with homeassistant? Is there any alternative to their hub?

I plan on extending my network of electrician devices and they like to install Plejd.

Hue lights and the Zigbee blinds are in Home Assistant, with the Ecobee, the Reolink cameras, and the robot vacuum. Third of an acre out back is still me and a push mower.

What I want is ordinary. Once the sprinklers finish, the mower stays put until the grass isn't soaked, and if it gets stuck I want a ping on my phone. Kids in the yard, I stop it myself. Not leaving that call to a camera.

Goko M6 is one of a few I'm looking at. For now I'd plan on its own app, the same way I'd plan on any of the others. I haven't confirmed it talks to anything else in the house, so a connection isn't part of why I'd buy it.

If you run a robot mower next to automatic sprinklers, how do you keep the two schedules from stepping on each other? When it gets stuck, does the app actually tell you, or do you end up walking out to check?

A few weeks ago I posted that my hot tub room was finally finished.

Technically, that wasn’t completely true. There was still one last project I wanted to finish: making the lighting in the room automatically match the lighting inside the hot tub.

Earlier this year I posted about how I turned my hot tub into a “smart” hot tub using an ESP32 and Home Assistant. While working on that, I also added an M5Stack Color Sensor RGB Unit based on the TCS3472.

I mounted the sensor inside the hot tub housing, positioned so it can see the light from one of the LEDs inside the tub. The LEDs shine through into the tub itself, which gives the sensor enough light and color information to reliably determine which color is currently being displayed.

That color information is then made available to Home Assistant.

The next part of the project was adding addressable lighting to the hot tub room itself.

After quite a bit of research I ended up using a 24V WS2805 RGB+CCT strip, controlled through WLED. I specifically wanted a 24V strip because the total run is fairly long and I wanted to avoid having to add power injection everywhere.

The physical installation turned out to be one of the more annoying parts of the project.

I initially planned to mount a series of 50 cm aluminium LED profiles directly onto the roughly 5-meter-long wooden beams. I quickly discovered that getting that many individual profiles perfectly straight and aligned over that distance was almost impossible. Even a tiny difference between two profiles becomes very obvious once you have a long continuous LED strip running through them.

My solution was to first glue all of the aluminium profiles for each side onto one very thin, long wooden strip. Once everything was aligned properly, I could mount that entire strip onto the beam in one piece.

That worked much better and resulted in a much cleaner installation.

The system is now fully functional.

There’s a Sonoff NSPanel near the entrance of the hot tub room which I use as the main control panel for both the hot tub and the room lighting.

If I simply switch on the room lighting, the WS2805 strip starts in a warm white mode.

But when I switch on the LEDs inside the hot tub, the ESP32 detects their color. Home Assistant then uses that detected color to control the WLED strip, so the lighting around the entire room automatically follows the color of the hot tub.

So if the tub turns blue, the room turns blue. Red becomes red, green becomes green, etc. When using white light, the RGB+CCT strip also gives me proper white lighting rather than trying to fake it with RGB.

It was probably a slightly over-engineered solution to the problem of “I want the lights to match”, but that is half the fun of Home Assistant anyway.

And for me, this is pretty much the perfect result: sitting in the hot tub with a cold beer and a movie while the entire room is softly illuminated in the same color as the tub.

I clicked on Resideo app this week to check temperature of our cabin in Wi. The normal screen didn't come up. Instead a screen came up stating i needed to create a new "First Alert" account

I called resideo service today 1-800-633-3991. After a short hold i got connected with "Ruby" and was just explaining the issue and when the line dropped.

I called back and got "Tony". He explained that the old app has been deprecated and i need to get the new app and create a new First Alert Account.

Ok, frustrating- but then he said i will need to be up at cabin to register my thermostat to this new app including sending pictures of the thermostat screen.

How stupid can Honeywell be to force users to travel to their remote thermostat to basically re-install!!!

This all happened with no advanced warning. They should have (1) notified users via email or the app so they could plan for this (2) allowed for some transition period vs just suddenly disabling the old app.

A few people in honeywell/resideo development need to be fired over this disaster.

Yeah, so now i need to drive 170 miles to my cabin just to re-install my thermostat so i can monitor temps before winter. What an Awful user experience with Honeywell / Resideo.

I have a rock solid Zigbee network in my home but I made the mistake of adding two Osram GU5.3 bulbs. Turns out they are absolute trash.

They were awful to pair to the network and have absolutely been the most poorly performing devices I own.

Does anyone have any recommendations for Zigbee GU5.3 bulbs that they would recommend?

There are surprisingly few options as far as I can tell from my searches and all of them don't seem to be well regarded. Even looking at the WiFi options seem to be reviewed pretty badly.

Has anyone found any great workarounds here? I thought that night light was the dimmest setting, but I've realized that cozy at 1% brightness is actually it. The wake up setting starts too bright for me, so I've had to add five different automations for my wake up routine which is a bit ridiculous.

Wondering if there's any workarounds to get it to start extra dim and then slowly get to a white daylight and stay there for a little while.

It would make it a lot easier to skip days or have different schedules on different days if it could just be one combined automation.

I am synced with the Google home app, so maybe I can do something there instead of through the Wiz app?

Also wondering about using Google home (or similar) to make schedules all simpler: I literally just have this bulb and a smart plug, which powers on a sad lamp that turns on in the same time frame. Just want to be able to schedule those to have a certain rhythm and possibly start at different times on different days of the week. And then easy voice control to control the light bulb at other times of day.

(If you missed the first post, you can check it out first post

Hey r/smarthome !

A while back I posted about Almanac Board—the digital wall calendar app I built to turn old, dusty Android tablets and wall-mounted screens into clean, always-on dashboards.

I got some fantastic feedback and requests from you guys, so I wanted to share a major update based on what people were asking for:

• Android TV & Box Support: The app is now fully optimized for the TV form factor and available on the Google Play Store. You can now turn any spare monitor or older TV into a dedicated wall calendar screen using a cheap TV box or stick, alongside traditional wall-mounted tablets.
• Event Details Popups: Based on your feedback, you can now tap/click on any calendar event to open a clean popup showing full details (time, location, description, notes).
• Always-on focus: Still designed for a clean, glanceable layout for your digital wall calendar and time without unnecessary clutter.

If you already use it or want to try it out on your tablet or TV setup, you can find it on the Play Store. Thanks again for all the great suggestions—keep the feedback coming!

Play Store link: Almanac Board on Google Play

I have Hunter Winslow 53097 fans, currently controlled by 99600 remotes.

I would like to be able to control the lights via Alexa. I tried to install IKEA KAJPLATS smart bulbs that run on Matter, with dimming disabled in the Hunter remote, but the receiver is cutting off the power, making the bulbs unresponsive once i use Alexa to turn them off (I’m not turning off the physical switch).

Could anyone advise if I can replace receivers with HunterSMART kit 99981? Would that work? Or do you have other solutions for how I can remotely manage the lights? I’m happy to keep the fan operation via the remote if necessary, as I’m not sure if that could also be operated via an app or Alexa?

Any help would be appreciated!

Hi everyone! I am not able to get the smart life devices to work on google home, I had a similar issue with Ikea and Hue devices but I finally solved those. I also tried deleting the app, linking, unliking, turning off the phone, installing again and all that jazz. Also tried to tell google to synchronize devices but nothing has made it go from grey to usable in the google home app.

Has anyone experienced this and has a solution to this issue?

Thanks so much!

عايز منتج يكون بيقفل و يفتح اللمبه من الموبايل
لو حد عنده جهاز او حاجه محليه تكون رخيصه و ليها ابلكيشن بسيط زي تحكم عن بعد يكون فيها واي فاي بتتربط
بالتفلون او بلوتوث
(تتركب علي نفس زرار الاوضه )

I recently found out that window cleaning robots are a thing. The first time I saw one working on the outside of a window, I thought it could fall off at any second, especially on a second floor or higher.

It's not running around on the floor. It's working on the outside of a window. It's not running around on the floor. It's working on the outside of a window.

I know it must have some safety features, but I'm still curious. Do these things actually stay put? For anyone who owns one, have you ever had any issues with it falling?

Most of our upstairs is carpet, except for the bathroom, which has tile floors and needs mopping sometimes.

I'm looking for a robot vacuum that can vacuum the carpet and mop the bathroom without getting the carpet wet. Ideally, I'd like to set up each room separately in the app.
I've been looking at a few models but not sure one.

As a someone who still uses and maintains a landline, I am wondering if there exists some device that can perform the echo connect functions of annoucing caller id and make voice activated phone calls?

If anyone knows of a landline community I would appreciate information on that 😅

I have an Amazon Echo Dot and a third-generation Apple TV. I want to automate my home and set up lighting and pre-defined scenes.
What kind of equipment would you recommend that works with both Apple TV and Alexa?

Could you provide some suggestions? I’m new to this topic.

Thanks in advance.

Hello everyone,

I hope I can find some help here.

We have recently bought a house in Germany.
It is from 2012 and has some good smart home KNX setup.

But I wan to move everything to home assistant now, since the current system is just usable with a fixed walled tablet.

After various searches through the web and discussions with ChatGPT I came to the conclusion that I need a KNX IP Router since this was not available in the setup.
Today we had the electrician here and he installed for us the SCN-IP100.03 from MDT.
After research this should be the sufficient model here.

But he told me upfront he does not really work with MDT - but was optimistic he can at least integrate into our system and I can take it from there.

The router was then installed but apparently the software could not be installed via ETS.
He tried it first with ETS 5 but as this failed, he deleted everything and installed ETS6 with the V3 database.

But apparently it still did not work for the installation.
Sadly only my wife was here and I could not support.
He said the installation did not go through.

I can see the IP router within my network through my FRITZ!Box.

But since the software is not really installed most likely I can’t really progress.

My understanding now is, that we need still our electrician with ETS software. But i want to avoid that I call him and he comes again and we are facing the same issue.

Therefore my question: is there anything else I can do to test or prepare? Anyone had a similar situation?
Having this back and forth with our electrician will also be very pricy and I really would like to avoid that.

So happy to receive any help here. Also if you need more info - I will happily share it.

Cheers!

Hello everyone,

I've been looking to buy a Smart door lock for my home, but I am unable to find any options with UWB in europe. It seems that you can make the U400 work, but that its not 100% supported. Even new releases like the LG doesn't seem to have any options in Europe. Is there no future releases that are not too far away, or should I assume that there wont be any releases or any available options any time soon?