home-assistant

60 Articles

Adding Capabilities To Inexpensive Solar Modules

May 15, 2026 by 10 Comments

Solar power has gotten cheap enough that putting up panels is among the cheapest ways of providing energy. This isn’t just the case for bulk electricity on a power grid, either; even small devices are easier and cheaper to power with solar than ever before. For example, landscape lighting which once relied on 12V or 24V DC wires all over one’s yard with a transformer and power supply hidden somewhere have partially been converted to simpler individual solar-powered lights now. These small devices can also be given additional capabilities as [Mauro] demonstrates.

In this case, [Mauro]’s goal was to add on-demand lighting to a solar-powered light which was otherwise motion-activated only. To do this, they added a NRF24L01+ radio inside the light’s housing paired with an STM32 microcontroller. This secondary system is largely separated from the existing control circuitry with the exception of being able to switch the lights and receiving its power from the same solar panel. [Mauro] also created a small library to help with communicating with these new modules, whether that’s using a home automation system like Home Assistant or some other method.

Although adding in a few capabilities to inexpensive solar lighting might seem simple on the surface, a project like this is a gateway to adding in all kinds of interesting features to things with built-in solar panels and lots of free space in their cases. The best example here is the addition of a Meshtastic node to one of these lights, making it convenient and stealthy, but we could also see adding in other remote hardware to a landscape lighting module like a gate sensor or a plant health monitoring system.

IR Device Control That Lives Off The Cloud

May 2, 2026 by 4 Comments

There are lots of smart home systems that will let you blast your older dumb appliances with infrared to control them. However, many are tied to ugly cloud systems that can frustrate you on a regular basis. [Steelcuts] whipped up a cloudless solution to this problem instead.

IR2MQTT does pretty much exactly what it says in the name. It allows integrating things like air conditioners and televisions into a Home Assistant setup with the use of an IR blaster and a neat, tidy web app. You use it with an ESP32 or ESP8266 running a firmware based on ESPHome to actually do the IR blasting. In turn, IR2MQTT is a back-end plus a web interface that lets you setup all your IR devices without having to manually capture IR codes and create YAML files to do everything. It’s also integrated with large databases of IR codes for common appliances so in many cases, you can just look up your gear and get it working the easy way.

Sometimes all you need to get the job done is an IR LED and the will to use it. If you’re cooking up your own infrared hacks, don’t hesitate to let us know on the tipsline.

DIY Smart Button Gets Surprisingly Complicated

April 22, 2026 by 3 Comments

There’s a reason that the standards specifications for various wireless communications protocols are extremely long and detailed. [Made by Dennis] found this out first hand when he decided to build a wireless button from scratch.

The major issues with wireless devices is one of power consumption. If reliable power is available from a wall plug or solar panel, this isn’t as serious of a concern. But [Dennis] is using batteries for his buttons, so minimizing power consumption is a priority. He’s going with the nRF52, a microcontroller designed for low power and which has a built in wireless radio, and configuring it in a way that uses the least amount of energy possible.

From there, [Dennis] turns to the wireless communication. He goes into detail about how the microcontroller is woken up, how it sends its data packets to another wireless-enabled microcontroller, and how they handle handshakes and acknowledgements of data. For something as simple as a button press, it gets quickly more complicated especially when adding some basic encryption and security to the communications protocol.

With all the design decisions out of the way, the system can be built. [Dennis] has created custom PCBs for his devices, and also included some expansion I/O for other sensors and peripherals beyond just a pushbutton. All of the schematics and code are available on the project’s GitHub page and the STL files can be found at Printables.

For those new to offline home automation or who are turning away from cloud-based services lately, there are some easy entry points that don’t require much extra hardware or expenditure.

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DIY UPS Keeps Home Assistant Running

April 19, 2026 by 26 Comments

If you put a bunch of computers in charge of your house, it’s generally desirable to ensure their up-time is as close to 100% as possible. An uninterruptible power supply can help in this regard. To that end, that’s why [Bill Collis] whipped one up for his Home Assistant setup.

[Bill]’s UPS is charged with one job—keeping the Home Assistant Green hub and an Xfinity XB7 cable modem online when the grid goes dark. The construction is relatively straightforward. When the grid is up, everything is powered via a Mean Well AC-DC 12 V power supply, while the power is also used to charge a 12.8 V 10 Ah lithium iron phosphate battery pack. When the grid goes out, the system switches over to running the attached hardware on pure battery power. A Victron BatteryProtect is used to automatically disconnect the load if the battery voltage drops too low. Meanwhile, a Shelly Plus Uni module is used to monitor battery voltage and system status, integrated right into Home Assistant itself.

If you want to keep the basics of your smart home going at all times, something like this is a pretty simple way to go.  We’ve featured some other great UPS builds in the past, too. If you’re whipping up your own hardware to keep your home or lab alive in the dark of night, don’t hesitate to notify the tipsline.

Meshtastic Does More Than Simple Communication

February 22, 2026 by 27 Comments

Meshtastic has been experiencing a bit of a renaissance lately, as the off-grid, long-range radio text messaging protocol gains a ton of new users. It’s been used to create mesh networks in cities, during disasters and protests, in small groups while hiking or camping, and for search and rescue operations. Although it’s connected plenty of people together in all of these ways, [GreatScott!] wanted to put it to work connecting some computing resources instead. He has a garden shed that’s too far for WiFi, so Meshtastic was used to connect it instead.

This isn’t a project to bring broadband Internet out to the shed, though; Meshtastic is much too slow for that. All he really wanted to do here was to implement a basic alarm system that would let him know if someone had broken in. The actual alarm triggering mechanism is an LED emitter-detector pair installed in two bars, one of which sends a 12V signal out if the infrared beam from the other is broken. They’re connected to a Heltec ESP32 LoRa module which is set up to publish messages out on the Meshtastic communications channel. A second module is connected to the WiFi at the house which is communicates with his Home Assistant server.

Integrating Meshtastic devices into Home Assistant can be pretty straightforward thanks to the various integrations already available, but there is some configuration to get these specific modules working as an alarm. One of the pins on the remote module had to be set up to watch the light bar, and although sending the alarm message out when this triggered worked well, the received signal never passed through to Home Assistant until [GreatScott!] switched to using the RadioLib library an an MQTT integration instead. But with perhaps more configuration than he planned for out of the way, [GreatScott!]’s alarm is up and running. Meshtastic projects often balloon into more than we had originally planned though, in more ways than one. You can follow along as our own [Tom Nardi] attempts to connect all of New Jersey with this new protocol.

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Exclamation Point Indicates Worthy Notifications

February 22, 2026 by 1 Comment

As far as punctuation goes, the exclamation mark is perhaps the most eye-catching of the bunch. That’s why [Conrad Farnsworth] thought this form would be perfect for his Home Assistant notifier build. 

The key to this build is the large bi-color printed housing in the shape of an exclamation mark. It makes for an attractive wall-hanging, but it also perfectly serves the purpose [Conrad] had in mind. Inside the enclosure is an ESP32, hooked up to a string of 16×8 LED matrixes which are commanded over I2C. These sit behind a white panel in the enclosure to nicely diffuse the light and make their output more readable. The ESP32 displays notifications on the LEDs that are fed from Home Assistant, such as when the mailbox sensor is triggered or if a vehicle is detected in the driveway. There’s also a bell on the unit to provide audible notifications, which us dinged with a solenoid fired via a 2N2222 transistor switching a 12 volt supply from a boost converter.

It’s a neat build that fits nicely into [Conrad]’s daily life and appears to have some genuine utility. If you’re looking for other ways to neatly display notifications where you can see them, you might consider whipping yourself up a smart mirror.

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Habit Detection For Home Assistant

February 8, 2026 by 15 Comments

Computers are very good at doing exactly what they’re told. They’re still not very good at coming up with helpful suggestions of their own. They’re very much more about following instructions than using intuition; we still don’t have a digital version of Jeeves to aid our bumbling Wooster selves. [Sherrin] has developed something a little bit intelligent, though, in the form of a habit detector for use with Home Assistant.

In [Sherrin]’s smart home setup, there are lots of things that they wanted to fully automate, but they never got around to implementing proper automations in Home Assistant. Their wife also wanted to automate things without having to get into writing YAML directly. Thus, they implemented a sidecar which watches the actions taken in Home Assistant.

The resulting tool is named TaraHome. When it detects repetitive actions that happen with a certain regularity, it pops up and suggests automating the task. For example, if it detects lights always being dimmed when media is playing, or doors always being locked at night, it will ask if that task should be set to happen automatically and can whip up YAML to suit. The system is hosted on the local Home Assistant instance. It can be paired with an LLM to handle more complicated automations or specific requests, though this does require inviting cloud services into the equation.

We’ve featured lots of great Home Assistant hacks over the years, like this project that bridges 433 MHz gear to the smart home system. If you’ve found your own ways to make your DIY smart home more intelligent, don’t hesitate to notify the tipsline!