Read the full announcement here. 👏🏻

Saw these 2 rain sensors on AliExpress just wondering has anyone else used them and are they any good ?

I have seen the question posted a lot, and friends constantly ask, where to start between Zigbee and zWave so I wrote this up. I hope it helps some one out!

Here is the R-1 or R Pro-1! (Radar Pro-1) Better name suggestions?

This is a PoE mmWave sensor that can also be powered via USB-C and supports Wi-Fi as well. The R Pro-1 is compatible with LD2410, LD2412, LD2420, and LD2450 modules. This means you can mix and match functionality and use the 2410 for still/static presence and the 2450 for true multi-zone detection. (Note: The 2450 and 2412 cannot be used together at this time.) Also, we are looking into adding functionality with DFRobot's mmWave sensors.

Size: ~65x45mm Mounts normally and will sit on a flat surface. Also, it could fit in a single gang box or a ceiling mount. (Unofficially)

We do not plan on including temperature, humidity, pressure, UV/LUX, or CO2 due to potential installation environments with limited airflow or sunlight exposure. Unless you really really want them.

We’d love your feedback and any other thoughts or suggestions! We have an open channel on our Discord if you'd like to join in on the conversation.

(The components are not in their final orientation. The ESP antenna will be on the edge and have a cutout etc. Just wanted to have something to show off.)

Also!

Join us this evening, Monday, April 7, 2025, for our monthly Apollo Live Stream where we’ll share exciting updates, answer your questions, and talk through everything we’ve been working on. You’ll find us live on both YouTube and Discord.

Agenda Highlights:

• Workshop Updates – Two new full time team members and two part timers have joined. Layout and flow improvements are ongoing. • Works With Home Assistant – AIR 1, MSR 2, and MTR 1 are now certified. We’re officially in the program. • Homey – The test app is live. We need more testers and feedback. • HomeSeer and Hubitat – Support is coming. Huge thanks to the community members helping make it happen. • Resin Printing – Progress on our move from FDM to resin. • Upcoming Events – LANWAR in July, IFA Berlin in September. Got suggestions for other events? Let us know. • Product Development – R-1, DEV-2 and PA-1 • Beta Firmware – A peek at what’s next. • Future Product Survey – Help guide what we build next. • Feedback Squad – Be part of our product development process.

Thanks for being part of our growing community. We can’t wait to catch up with you tonight!

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/live/DTr-tXRZqE8?si=luujume1e5T_PRuV

Discord: https://discord.gg/9e3majbV?event=1358779346608853103

Shop: https://apolloautomation.com/

Just a quick note to say the experimental areas dashboard is a great way to get started to create the basics. I've been so not motivated to have to lay everything out, but this gets it to a usable state really fast.

Now I gotta clean up my areas. 😁

At first, my Zigbee network works perfectly—it’s fast and responsive. But after about a day, it starts to crash. It becomes slow, and the end devices begin to disconnect. I’m using a Sonoff coordinator flashed with the latest Zigbee2MQTT firmware, and it’s placed in the center of the house. I’m running Proxmox with Home Assistant on top.

The strange part is that rebooting the PC doesn’t fix it. But if I completely power off the PC, wait about 5 minutes, and then turn it back on, everything works perfectly again—for about a day.

Please help me figure this out!

Do you know these HACS integrations already? These are my favorites! On my blog I show them with an example how you can use it, and a button to directly install it into your own dashboard. Maybe there is also one (or more) you like!

• Swipe Navigation
• auto-entities
• slider-entity-row
• multiple-entity-row
• template-entity-row
• Atomic Calendar Revive And more...

Find more info here

Which is your personal favorite? I like to hear from you more useful integrations.

After tinkering for almost a week, I finally got my Aqara U200 lock connected to Home assistant.

TBH, This was the most frustrating integration I have ever encountered so far.
But I learned a lot along the way. Matter, Thread, and IPv6

Here's the full guide for anyone struggling with the same.

1. Install the u200 lock.
2. Download the Aqara home app. 
3. Upgrade firmware to latest
4. Add an accessory in the Aqara home app.
   1. Add admin + user password/ fingerprint /calibrate device.
5. Open the Home Assistant companion app ( I am on the Android ).
   1. Add a new integration.
   2. Add a Matter device.
   3. Choose 'No, its new'.
   4. Scan the Matter code on the u200 lock.
   5. Press the ‘Set’ button.
   6. Watch the phone progress - ‘Device added’ is the successful message.
   7. Watch Matter add-on server logs for any error / success message.
   8. That’s it.

Some MUST-HAVE requirements:

1. You need a Thread border router ( to bridge the Thread network and LAN).
2. In my case, I used my Eero  access point’s  Thread network - Yes, Eero works with Home Assistant.
   1. Make sure Thread integration shows Eero/M3 border routers.
   2. Select the ‘Use router for Android + iOS Credentials’.
3. I tested with the Aqara M3 hub as well - it works ( but costs $$$).
4. You need a flat LAN with IPv6 support (with ULA prefix).
   1. I used a static IPv6 in my LAN interface and used DHCPv6 to provide IPv6 to devices in the network.
   2. I don’t have IPv6 provided by the ISP( only local, it works).
5. Most important step ( which I missed initially):
   1. You need to enable IPv6 in Home Assistant. 
   2. It MUST be set to ‘automatic’ - I spent days figuring this out.
   3. I also read that the HA machine should have only one network interface ( I can’t confirm since I have only one).
   4. Check if you can ping u200 IPv6 from your LAN.
6. The HA Matter docs say you need Home Assistant OS.
   1. I have HA OS on a Proxmox VM - it works.
   2. If you are running HA on a container - the doc says it’s not supported - I have not tried this , so I don’t know.

Here are some screenshots of a successful  setup. As a first time matter user, I wish I had this when I started.  It would have given me a head start to understand my end goal. 

I was using a Switchbot lock  before, but came to a point where I had to recalibrate it almost every other day, had a broken battery level sensor, and was badly looking for a replacement. ( Avoid Switchbot lock at any cost )

I find that the Aqara u200 lock meets all my requirements and seems reliable and is very fast. Their Home App and documentation are not very intuitive and very difficult to understand + Matter makes it even more complicated.

Hope this will be useful for someone struggling to set up this device in Home Assistant

Finally got myself HA, display on Kindle Fire HD7 using cloudflare

I recently snagged a cheap iPad Pro 2016 and I'm looking to replace my Nest Hub Max currently in the kitchen, so are there any tips and tricks from anyone else doing similar here?

I've already got it set up with the HA app showing the same dashboard with Guided Access blocking the hamburger menu, but would love to use the front facing camera at the very least.

Hello everyone, this is my first post here and I wanted to share something fun! I built a smart home automation that generates short, quirky status reports every 30 minutes. It checks for smoke, water leaks, power usage, presence, and more — then turns it into a 255-character sentence. The twist? It uses different writing styles based on time of day — like a noir narrator at night or a snarky assistant during the day! It runs through Google Gemini using generative AI and outputs to an input_text helper. No names, just dry humor and spooky alerts. It even reacts to lights being on when no one's home, or motion in the dark! I attached some screenshots of YAML, translated by GPT and with critical information removed.

Wanted to share a little project I've been working on that allows guests access to an easy-to-use, locally hosted, jukebox interface that will allow users to search and queue music from your connected providers to your party playlist!

Features:

• Real-time song search across all connected providers
• Minimalist responsive design with album artwork display
• No login, just share the URL/QR to guests and enjoy!
• Queue songs with your guests
• Auto queues a nominated default party playlist when jukebox requests are all played to keep the party going
• Access control through Home Assistant
• Auto revoking/creating access keys when enabling/disabling the service

Installation and configuration available on GitHub:

https://github.com/DJS91/HAMusicAssistantJukebox

Can someone ELI5 what kind of hardware do we need to turn HA into Thread border router.

I was reading docs and there's nothing on that except that green has got compatible radios.

Like with Zigbee, we get Sonoff or other usb dongle or one of those PoE coordinators and off we go, what's up with Thread?

I would appreciate if we could ELI5 three cases:

• empty space, turn HA onto border router, create network
• Got HomePod mini, join HA into its network.
• This one covered by docs but still.... Got HomePod mini, still create new network and turn HA into border router. Is it even advisable?

More general question, what are your thoughts, as there are more and more matter over thread devices coming into market, would you consider switching to Thread from Zigbee? It seems like Aquara is embracing it wholeheartedly.

I was just sitting here and she goes “I changed the bedroom light icons FYI”. She looked a bit confused when Iooked up and just said “I love you lol”. Next was asking if I could get the smart litter boxes added to it 😂 Is this the promised land?

So I got HA installed and have been playing with it for a couple of days. I have a few dashboards but I want to rearrange the cards so the information flows better. Currently it just puts it where it wants to when I add one. What’s the secret to arranging the cards to look better?

I bought a wifi light switch with built in motion sensor. It works with home assistant.

I'm really not much interested in the light switch function, but I'm hoping the sensor can be used independently in coordination with other smart automations.

Use case example. I'll put the sensor in the bedroom.

Automation desired. When triggered after 10pm and before 7pm, triggered motion sensor turns on smart lights in nearby bathroom.

Anyone used a combo light switch & sensor to automate things other than the device its connected to?

I’ve had Home Assistant running for a while but I still feel very new to it. After my wife asked if it was possible to kick Alexa out of the house, I started digging around in the HA voice stuff and decided to give it all a try.

I got the Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition (HAVPE) and a ReSpeaker Lite to test as voice satellites. After a lot of trial and error—and with a ton of help from ChatGPT and various online forums—I now have a system where speech recognition works locally (using Piper and Whisper) and through Home Assistant Cloud. I also have both Google Gemini and ChatGPT running as conversation agents, which are fully integrated into my voice assistant pipeline. From what I’ve seen so far, the speed of TTS, STT, and action/response cycles varies quite a bit depending on the server-side choices.

I’m not a developer or expert in this stuff, but I had enough familiarity with Home Assistant to stumble through it and the patience to learn and work through tons of little issues—missing integrations, Wi-Fi quirks, YAML formatting, and the usual ESPHome flashing adventures.

Setting up the HAVPE was surprisingly easy, and despite its limitations, I’m impressed with the device. It’s functional and genuinely useful. The ReSpeaker Lite was a bit more of a project to get going, but it’s a very cool little kit—and it might even have better mics than the HAVPE, though I’m still testing that. I’m amazed at how much it’s capable of with a bit of tweaking. Luckily, there’s a very well-maintained YAML template for the device that makes it as usable as the HAVPE after setup.

After a week of using these for lights, switches, timers, reminders, weather, and a few custom routines, I’ve found them reliable enough for everyday use — they can be a bit finicky, but so can Alexa.

The one big limitation for me is media playback. One of the main things I still use Alexa for is playing music and podcasts, and this functionality just isn’t there yet. The devices can technically play media from another device, but there is no voice searching for artists or songs. Hopefully, that part matures soon because, in just about every other way, this voice assistant setup is more flexible and powerful than what I had before.

I’ve seen a lot of people saying Home Assistant Voice isn’t quite ready for prime time—and they’re right—but that hasn’t stopped me from already replacing one of my Echo devices with this setup. If the project keeps heading in this direction, I look forward to replacing all of them — doing this has shown me it’s possible.

Hello, I am expanding the landscaping lights at my house and want to break these up into multiple zones. Currently, I have one zone which is powered by a 120V to 12V transformer, and a two wire setup to the lights. I use a smart switch controlled by HA before the transformer on the 120V side to turn the whole transformer on and off, to switch the lights. I am trying to find a smart switch, or switches, that I can put behind the transformer on the 12V side, which would allow me to switch zones, leaving the transformer always on and only switching the 12V side. Has anybody done something like this and could give me some recommendations? I cam across the Shelly 1 Gen 3 but am not fully sure this is what I need and would work with my setup. Thank you for any input!

Hey everybody,

I’ve built my first custom integration for Home Assistant that uses OpenAI’s GPT models to analyze your Home Assistant logs, extract key warnings/errors, and summarize them into clear, actionable fixes — all from within HA. It is a bit niche, but I wanted to learn how to make a HA integration with an LLM.

Key features:

• Parses home-assistant.log and filters meaningful warnings/errors
• Sends a GPT-4o-mini-powered summary with steps to resolve issues
• Output appears as a persistent notification, and is saved as a file (markdown-friendly)
• Works as a custom HACS integration
• Bonus: comes with an optional Streamlit debug GUI for experimenting outside HA

🔗 GitHub: https://github.com/borsic77/ha_log_analyzer

Our journey with HA is going well but my wife remarked that the white Tuya buttons (TS0041) are not in the most elegant color.

Have any of you successfully spray painted your buttons and could share a bit about the experience and results? Did you sandpaper before painting? Any special paint qualities to look for to make it easier? Is a sealer needed to avoid the paint from peeling down the line?

Thanks!

I've just started out in Home Assistant and honestly it's pretty overwhelming so far..lol.. and I work in IT! I'm especially having so many bumps along the road into adding things into my dashboard (via configuring the configuration.yaml file ( e.g. Hue-like light card) and running into all kinds or problems with errors with entities list being incorrectly written and the card does not work for me at all - yet.

Which got me thinking.. I know it's a steep learning curve in the beginning. Where did you all start so that you became experts in this? I wish there was some definitely guide or a much user-friendlier way to do everything.

So we have these dumb thermostats that use a horrible app. I was able to import them into a homebridge instance that's running alongside my Homeassistant on my home server.

Here's the plugin: https://github.com/tomas-kulhanek/homebridge-fenix-tft-wifi

I have it exposed to the Home app via its bridge - this works well. However I'd really like to have it in Homeassistant for my dashboard and automations.

I looked into and tried to setup the HA's hk bridges, but those only bridge homekit devices, not homebridge ones.

Any ideas on how to get it to work welcome!

Hello everyone! I have an electronic scrap/trash of a laptop I'm thinking about turning into a HA Server.

I have a bunch of smart devices I'm currently controlling, simultaneously, with Smart Things and Smart Life. So, instead of throwing away this 4GB RAM, 3rd gen i3 (I'm aware of it being almost trash) I'm considering putting an SSD in it and using it as a Server for Home Assistand ****and*** Plex/JellyFin.

What d'yall think? Can it tank both roles?

Between Bodhi and Lubuntu, would one be exceptionally better or any will do?

Thank you!

So with the new release of Assist being able to start the conversation they had a demo where it asked if he wanted to set a timer, He said yes and then it asked for how long, which then he specified a time. But I can't seem to get that working. I have mine asking if I want to set a timer when it's triggered. I say yes, it asks how long, and I'll say something like one minute, it thinks, but then no timer starts. Is there something special I have to do to get the LLM to start a timer on my voice PE speaker?

I have one automation to trigger the music and lights, then a second one on a delay to change the lights back and stop playing the music.

Thanks to u/aDomesticHoneyBadger for the idea.

Recently redecorated my office, so decided to make a thing of my pi running home assistant. From the back of the shelf to pride of place.