home-assistant

63 Articles

Modern E-Ink Dashboards, Kindle And Otherwise

July 3, 2026 by 13 Comments

People have been attempting to turn Kindles into more than e-readers since the first devices came out nearly two decades ago. The e-ink displays are low-power and great for displaying information that doesn’t refresh too often, and with Amazon continuing their trend of bricking their older devices there will be more of these devices available. [Hemant] built a weather dashboard with one of his, but since then had requests for other types of e-reader dashboards and has a guide for making more general-purpose use of an old Kindle.

The first approaches outlined here involve the installation of a dashboard client on the Kindle and pointing it at a server that hosts a PNG image of whatever information needs to be displayed. The client simply displays that image and refreshes it at predetermined intervals. There are a number of options for creating that server as well, including using Home Assistant for those who already have a home automation system deployed. The benefit of using Home Assistant is that it’s much more straightforward to gather data for the dashboards from sensors and other peripherals that are already installed.

Installing a client like this might seem straightforward, and it can be, provided that the Kindle involved is jailbroken or capable of being jailbroken. An Amazon update recently broke many modern devices’ ability to execute the jailbreak, so not every Kindle can do this anymore. But [Hemant] goes into detail about this and also outlines some methods for using generic e-ink displays instead, and also dives into the hardware and software behind building a server to host the dashboard images for those without Home Assistant already running. It’s a great overview for those who have always wanted something like this but never knew where to start.

RF Hacking A Ceiling Fan Via The Remote

June 28, 2026 by 16 Comments

[Sam Wilkinson] recently installed a Dreo CLF513S ceiling fan in his place — it’s cheap, well-sized, and blows air around as you’d expect it to. The only problem is that it only works with an ugly cloud-only smart home setup out of the box. Never mind, though, because [Sam] figured out how to hack up a custom solution.

Hacking efforts began with the included remote control. [Sam] identified that the remote had to be RF, since it didn’t need line of sight to work properly. The FCC ID on the back of the device further indicated this was the case. Armed with that knowledge, it was simply a case of figuring out the commands sent by the remote, building something to replay them, and then hooking that into [Sam]’s existing Home Assistant setup.

The remote ran on 433.92 MHz, a not-uncommon bit of spectrum for these sort of appliances. An RTL-SDR was thusly enlisted to capture the output, with a spectrogram indicating the remote used simple on-off keying to send commands. Once commands were captured, [Sam] grabbed an ESP32-C6 microcontroller, hooked it up to a RFM69HCW radio transceiver, and programmed it to replay the fan on/off command. From there, a little dabbling with MQTT got the ESP32 controlling the fan as desired from within the Home Assistant ecosystem.

Sometimes, it’s hard to find smart home gear that actually suits your tastes and budgets. Often, a bit of tinkering can shape existing appliances to bend to your will instead. If you’re tweaking your own gear to better fit your smart home, don’t hesitate to notify the tipsline.

The turntable in question, or at least the same model.

Vintage Turntable Gets Brain Transplant And Home Assistant Integration

June 5, 2026 by 10 Comments

When [Marsupial] picked up a vintage Sansusi P-L45 turntable, he figured it would be an easy fix: a few capacitors, a belt or two, and maybe a new cartridge, the usual. But it turned out the electronics were fried, which set the stage for an upgrade that turned it into what may be the world’s only ESP32-driven, Home Assistant integrated, linear tracking turntable.

That last bit, the linear tracking, is why the turntable originally had a microprocessor in the first place: rather than an arm that pivots along the groove naturally, fancy turntables towards the end of the golden era of vinyl slid the needle along a linear track at a variable speed to follow the spiral groove on the record. You can see that in action in the demo video below, though it’s of a working version owned by [BFinks].

The fancy linear mechanism required electronic control to match the speed to the RPM, and in the example of Sansusi’s P-L45, that was provided by an NEC microcontroller on a daughter-board labelled “F4992 CPU”. CPU is a grandiose title, perhaps, but that’s irrelevant since the chip on the board was deader than disco.

That meant [Marsupial] had some reverse engineering to do — figuring out exactly what that chip did to drive this board, in order to replicate its behavior on an ESP32-S3. Luckily the golden era of vinyl correlated with the golden era of service manuals, and the manuals are still available, so [Marsupial] had a big leg up on that. After making the turntable work like stock, what else to do with the extra capability of the ESP32 than plug it into HA and make it really automatic?

Of course it wasn’t quite that easy: a new daughter-board was created that needed to do level shifting to the ESP32’s modern 3.3 V logic as well as hardware debounce on some inputs. The whole saga is very well documented on [Marsupial]’s blog WeAreAllGeeks. The link here takes you to the overview, but he’s got a lot more info on other pages — and of course links to the firmware and PCB design if you happen to have a Sansusi turntable in need of a brain transplant.

Vinyl lovers will appreciate this project much more than the last ESP32 “turntable” we featured, which was anything but. If you want to get into records but don’t have a turntable, you can always make your own.

Continue reading “Vintage Turntable Gets Brain Transplant And Home Assistant Integration” →

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.

Continue reading “DIY Smart Button Gets Surprisingly Complicated” →

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.