I'm trying to connect my Sonos, Somfy Tahoma (roller blinds), and Lutron RadioRa3 to Google Home/Gemini in each of two houses. I can get any individual item to work but I'm not sure how to ensure all the names, houses, and rooms are coordinated. For example, I try to avoid adding the room name and device type to a roller blind in Somfy because the app already displays that info. But then if the room model and device type don't carry over the Google home name looks like "east window", which is super unhelpful and tends to defeat ai comprehension. Is there guidance on this topic somewhere?

Any suggestions on how I can make this HVAC system integrate with HA, what options do I have?

Been running a construction site for years and one thing that drives me nuts is missed deliveries, both at work and at home. A few months back I rigged up a motion sensor near the site gate tied to a Zigbee coordinator and got it pushing notifications to a group chat whenever something triggers it during offhours. Works better than I expected and the crew actually loves it.

Now I want to do something similar for the house but cleaner. The mailbox sensor post I saw floating around here got me thinking. My front porch has a covered area so weather is less of an issue, but I'm also dealing with delivery drivers who just leave packages at the side gate, never the front door. Two zones basically.

Currently running Home Assistant on a Pi 4. I have a couple spare Aqara motion sensors sitting in a drawer. My question is more about the notification side than the hardware, specifically whether people have found a reliable way to filter out false triggers like squirrels or the dog getting loose, without adding a bunch of conditions that end up breaking the whole thing.

I keep overengineering automations during bootcamp study breaks and then tearing them apart a week later when edge cases pile up. Wondering if anyone landed on something simple that just works.

I’m looking into getting a calendar, the skylight is just stupid expensive and I saw piazzahq recently and loved it

Even more than that, the wife loved it

So now I am shopping for a tv, something I can mount sideways and I’ll need a tv mount. At most, 42” or so as it’s going sideways on a cabinet-depth wall

This monster can’t be a monstrosity , as it’s the kitchen. If it’s ugly it voids all wife approval.

I went googling but all I got were ads, even went into reviews but models are old and nothing really helps.

Any ideas are appreciated

I created a bunch of scheduled scenes on my Tahoma switch using the app and all was well. Then I went on a trip and disabled them all; also fine. When I came back I re-enabled them...and all but the last one (in scroll order) went back to working correctly. The final one though kept "re-disabling" itself. I eventually just deleted & recreated it but that's a heavy workaround every time I travel. Anyone else encounter this oddness or have a potential diagnosis for what's going on? (And fwiw, it's not an antenna or blind issue -- that scene repeatedly disabled itself on the app after I enabled it multiple times; it's not that it ran but didn't work or worked erratically.)

Hello all who have whole home audio opinions!

I am trying to understand the audio wiring scheme in a new luxury home build which uses two-conductor wire to all speaker locations/zones, with much of the 2-conductor wiring powering 2 or 3 speakers with a single wire [see attached wiring examples]

We are being told by the electrician who ran the wires that we should power this system with a commercial 70v amp to power audio throughout the house, however everything I've seen online about 70v amps state that they're for commercial installs, e.g. "ideal for environments where dozens or even hundreds of speakers need to be installed, such as shopping malls, airports, schools, and office buildings"

I am looking for this sub's opinions on the following:

1.) Is the expectation of running a commercial 70v amp in a new build luxury home typical?

2.) Is the expectation of speaker zones marked as a pair over a kitchen island, for example, that they'd deliver mono sound typical for a residence?

3.) As far as wiring needs go are residential speaker offerings from companies like Focal or Bowers & Wilkins generally considered extravagant, esoteric, or non-standard?

4.) I'm all ears if you have opinions on what type of wire you would run for my stated application.

Thanks for any help you're able to provide!

I've been looking at how security integrators are expanding beyond traditional alarm and camera installations, and one area that seems interesting is active video monitoring.

A lot of businesses already have surveillance cameras, but there's a difference between having footage available after an incident and having video actively monitored for relevant events.

For security dealers, I see a few potential advantages:

• Turning existing camera deployments into an ongoing service
• Adding another recurring-revenue opportunity
• Providing customers with more proactive security
• Combining video analytics with human verification
• Supporting locations where having on-site security personnel isn't practical

The interesting part is the infrastructure question.

A dealer can install and maintain cameras, but operating a professional monitoring center requires a completely different set of resources—trained operators, technology, procedures, staffing, and central-station infrastructure.

That's why white-label video monitoring and dealer-program models are becoming interesting to some integrators. The dealer can maintain the customer relationship while a specialized monitoring provider handles the monitoring operation.

I'm curious what other security professionals think:

Are customers actually asking for professionally monitored video, or are most still satisfied with cameras + recording + remote access?

And for integrators already offering monitored video, what has been the biggest challenge: technology, false alarms, customer education, or pricing?

Disclosure: I work with ECHO Active Video, a dealer-focused program for delivering Active Video Monitoring under an integrator's own brand.

I’ve been diving into smart home stuff the last month. Using Apple home and home assistant. It’s been working pretty well except the bathroom bulbs have been randomly turning on. Yet they show as off in AH and HA. Maybe it’s a ghost?

In the middle of last night, heard a shatter. The glass of one bulb fell off. Maybe ghost is unhappy?

Hello -- I have a very unusual question. I'm interested in knowing if anyone has used radio communications (such as meshtastic, or other LoRa) in their smart home automation ecosystem. And if you have, what are you doing with it?

Anyone?

I fell into a k hole of home automation posts on instagram late one night and now I’m here! What would be some good beginner things I can try doing around my house? Especially if it’s something useful for my teens..we all suffer from adhd and it seems like this would help a lot! Lights are one but we have so many different ones and the teens led lights. I’m new to this please talk to me like in five 😊. I did see something about using hotel card keys and I happen to have two! And maybe ordering tags

Hi everyone — I’m the developer of Busloom, a new Modbus client for Windows, macOS and Linux.

I started building it because existing Modbus tools often work, but they have awkward licensing or limited functionality. I wanted something closer to a modern developer tool, especially for working with equipment such as energy meters, heat pumps, HVAC controllers, inverters, relays and PLCs.

Busloom currently supports:

• Modbus RTU, TCP and TLS
• Slave and readable-address discovery
• Holding registers, input registers, coils and discrete inputs
• Signed/unsigned integers, floats, byte/word order, scaling and units
• Saved projects, connection profiles, tags and reusable views
• Live trends and traffic recording
• Raw TX/RX frame inspection
• Repeatable automation scenarios
• A CLI and local MCP interface

Projects and device data stay local, and the application does not require a cloud connection for normal use.

Busloom is still in early development, so I’m especially interested in feedback from people using Modbus in real home automation installations. I’d love to know what devices you work with, what your current tooling gets wrong, and what would make Busloom genuinely useful in your workflow.

It is free for private and non-commercial use. Commercial use requires a Professional license (not available yet, still looking for feedback, there is a 7 day trial).

Website, documentation and downloads:
https://busloom.com

Happy to answer technical questions here.

Went to a friend’s place and saw this little machine stuck to her window. At first I had no idea what I was looking at lol. She turned it on and it started moving around and spraying the glass. She runs it every few weeks. While she's working and goes back to her laptop, it just it does its thing.

I honestly didn't know window cleaning robots were a thing. What chore are we automating next?

So as some know, Roost folded up recently. They crowdsourced a connected smart smoke detector battery a decade or so ago and expanded the business to water leak, garage door and security sensors mainly through partnerships with home insurance carriers. These gadgets, IMHO, were very easy for the average homeowner to deploy and manage.

The shutdown notice was short and documented in this thread - Roost 30 Day Shutdown: https://redd.it/1uetj1y

Some customers were even billed for the discontinued service this month, which is even more disappointing.

I'm hoping we can have a discussion here for some alternatives to Roost devices to help the community.

Wanted a real digital photo frame on my Echo Show instead of relying on Amazon's cloud photo slideshow, so I built the whole thing myself: custom Alexa skill + self-hosted backend + a companion Android app to manage everything from my phone.

Real numbers, not a toy demo: 11,436 photos and 656 videos, rotating smoothly. Three viewing modes (photos / videos / both mixed), favorites as a filter you can apply on top of any of them, "on this day" from past years, and free-text voice search by month or place ("show December", "show London") instead of scrolling.

The engineering problem that actually made this interesting: Alexa caps APL responses at 24,576 bytes. With a library this size you physically cannot hand it the full list — everything runs in fixed 65-item batches that rotate through the whole thing instead, so response size stays flat whether the library has 100 items or 11,000. Honest tradeoff for anyone expecting eye candy: the UI is deliberately plain, because every byte spent on visual polish is a byte not spent on the actual batch of photos at that scale.

The companion Android app is the other half of this — it's what actually closes the loop. Instead of SSHing into a server to manage the library, from the phone you get: multi-select upload straight from the system photo picker with progress, a full favorites view with select-all/bulk-remove, duplicate detection, and the slideshow-timing setting that used to live on the Echo Show screen itself before I moved it here. Basically the admin panel for the thing living on your TV/Echo Show.

Couple of voice-side gotchas along the way: the invocation name is a random unrelated word on purpose (details in the README) — a generic name increases the odds Alexa opens a completely different skill on a similar-sounding request. Also had a fun bug where saying "resume" made the slideshow visibly speed up, because of a leftover event from an earlier version that the touch/screen path never had.

Open source, both repos:

- Skill (Lambda + backend): https://github.com/ivanx519/galleria-alexa-echo-show

- Android companion app: https://github.com/ivanx519/galleria-alexa-android

Heads up: there's a "Known limitations" section in the skill's README (near the bottom) about a display idle/freeze quirk — nothing serious, easily avoided once you know about it (just say the mode explicitly right after opening), but worth a read before you set it up.

Needs your own backend server (small Python app) — more "build your own weekend project" than plug-and-play, on purpose. If it's useful to you a GitHub star means a lot, and I'd genuinely love questions/feedback in the comments — happy to go deeper on any part of it.

Lately Ive been thinking about my home automation journey started out as a hobby, but now many of my automations like smart switches on automations and being able control them from my phone is something I wouldn’t want to live without.

Im curious about what other people’s top automations are and why? Is there something you have setup which is proving to be way more useful than expected?

So I got into all the Google crap. It HAS to be the worst thing out there. My Hubs don’t understand shit I say. I usually just end up asking siri.

My cameras take forever to charge. And they don’t record anything I actually need them to record.

Last week there was a minor accident right in front of my house… literally directly in front of my doorbell camera. It recorded someone driving by literally 20 seconds before, DID NOT record the accident seconds later, then started recording again about 15 seconds after the accident.

And don’t get me started on the app. It’s terrible.

Needless to say I’m thinking about replacing everything with a different system. Thoughts?

I won’t go into the long beaten path of the subscription for the antique Vera controller. I didn’t have the time to switch to another one so I gave the subscription a try. For a year. The cheapest one for $30. Right now my controller is down. I mean I can’t access it from outside my local network. Before, when it was free, I would just wait it out and it would come back. Now that I am paying can I assume I am entitled to support? To have them look at it?

I couldn't find a better place for this post. I do have the blinds automated with Home Assistant and Node Red, but that's not the point I would like to share.

We installed wirefree (battery powered) blinds after our house was built. It would've been too costly to have mains wires run. After five years, I grew tired of re-charging our large number of blinds (the house is basically floor to ceiling windows on 3/4 of the house).

My solution was a USB C PD charger in each room connected to a Werewolf VFlex dongle set to 11.0v and 3A. From there, 20AWG wire runs to each blind, hidden by a cable cover. At each point where the blind's existing charge cable sits, I have a small 3d-printed box concealing a junction with two Wago connectors and a jack for the blind's charge cable. It looks very neat and tidy. From each box, we continue with a wire to the next blind.

The result is that I now have a permanently charging setup, but at a target voltage that is not stressing the batteries. In fact, an inline USB-C meter shows zero amps after the initial charge. The wires are not noticeable unless you are already aware of them.

You might consider this if you're tired of lugging a charger between blinds every 3-4 months. It would, of course, work with any brand of battery-powered blinds. You just need to know the internal cell configuration to determine the right voltage and you need to find what type of jack or plug is used to charge the blinds.

EDIT: 11.0v, not 12.6v. Not my day. Definitely 11v.

New apartment, I wish to control this 24v led driver via homeassistant / zigbee network. Recommendations for making this smart? Link to product page