home automation

300 Articles

The metal comm badge and M5stick on an LCARS mousepad

Control Your Smart Home With Trek-Inspired Comm Badge

February 25, 2026 by 27 Comments

One thing some people hate about voice control is that you need to have a process always running, listening for the wake word. If your system isn’t totally locally-hosted, that can raise some privacy eyebrows. Perhaps that’s part of what inspired [SpannerSpencer] to create this 24th century solution: a Comm Badge straight out of Star Trek: The Next Generation he uses to control his smart home.

This hack is as slick as it is simple. The shiny comm badge is actually metal, purchased from an online vendor that surely pays all appropriate license fees to Paramount. It was designed for magnetic mounting, and you know what else has a magnet to stick it to things? The M5StickC PLUS2, a handy ESP32 dev kit. Since the M5Stick is worn under the shirt, its magnet attached to the comm badge, some features (like the touchscreen) are unused, but that’s okay. You use what you have, and we can’t argue with how easy the hardware side of this hack comes together.

[Spanner] reports that taps to the comm badge are easily detected by the onboard accelerometer, and that the M5Stick’s microphone has no trouble picking up his voice. If the voice recordings are slightly muffled by his shirt, the Groq transcription API being used doesn’t seem to notice. From Groq, those transcriptions are sent to [Spanner]’s Home Assistant as natural language commands. Code for the com-badge portion is available via GitHub; presumably if you’re the kind of person who wants this, you either have HA set up or can figure out how.

It seems worth pointing out that the computer in Star Trek: TNG did have a wake word: “computer”. On the other hand it seemed the badges were used to interface with it just as much as the wake word on screen, so this use case is still show accurate. You can watch it in the demo video below, but alas, at no point does his Home Assistant talk back. We can only hope he’s trained a text-to-speech model to sound like Majel Barrett-Roddenberry. At least it gives the proper “beep” when receiving a command.

This would pair very nicely with the LCARS dashboard we featured in January. Continue reading “Control Your Smart Home With Trek-Inspired Comm Badge” →

Meshtastic Does More Than Simple Communication

February 22, 2026 by 26 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.

Continue reading “Meshtastic Does More Than Simple Communication” →

User Serviceable Parts

December 13, 2025 by 18 Comments

Al and I were talking on the podcast about the Home Assistant home automation hub software. In particular, about how devilishly well designed it is for extensibility. It’s designed to be added on to, and that makes all of the difference.
That doesn’t mean that it’s trivial to add your own wacky control or sensor elements to the system, but that it’s relatively straightforward, and that it accommodates you. If your use case isn’t already covered, there is probably good documentation available to help guide you in the right direction, and that’s all a hacker really needs. As evidence for why you might care, take the RTL-HAOS project that we covered this week, which adds nearly arbitrary software-defined radio functionality to your setup.

And contrast this with many commercial systems that are hard to hack on because they are instead focused on making sure that the least-common-denominator user is able to get stuff working without even reading a single page of documentation. They are so focused on making everything that’s in-scope easy that they spend no thought on expansion, or worse they actively prevent it.

Of course, it’s not trivial to make a system that’s both extremely flexible and relatively easy to use. We all know examples where the configuration of even the most basic cases is a nightmare simply because the designer wanted to accommodate everything. Somehow, Home Assistant has managed to walk the fine line in the middle, where it’s easy enough to use that you don’t have to be a wizard, but that you can make it do what you want if you are, and hence it got spontaneous hat-tips from both Al and myself. Food for thought if you’re working on a complex system that’s aimed at the DIY / hacker crowd.

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HRV Gets Home Automation Upgrades

October 26, 2025 by 5 Comments

In our modern semi-dystopia, it seems like most companies add automation features to their products to lock them down and get consumers to buy even more proprietary, locked-down components. The few things that are still user-upgradable are getting fewer and farther between, but there are still a few things that can be modified and improved to our own liking like this control panel for a heat recovery ventilator (HRV).

HRVs are systems that exchange fresh, outside air with stale, inside air while passing them both through a heat exchanger to keep from wasting energy. Many systems run continuously but they aren’t always needed, so some automation is beneficial. This upgrade from [vincentmakes] improves the default display for a Zehnder Comfoair Q350 HRV with a color display as well as adding it in to a home automation system, letting a user control fan speeds remotely as well as alerting the user when it’s time for filter replacements and providing up-to-date information from all the sensors in the HRV.

The project builds on a previous project which adapted an ESP32 to interact with the CAN bus used on these devices. With these upgrades the user can forgo the $300 proprietary upgrade that would be needed to get the same functionality otherwise. It’s also fully open-source so all that’s needed is to flash the firmware, replace the display, and enjoy the fresh air. There’s other modern HVAC equipment that can benefit from new controllers and a bit of automation as well.

Continue reading “HRV Gets Home Automation Upgrades” →

door spring

Compliant Contacts: Hacking Door Locks With Pen Springs

August 11, 2025 by 12 Comments

As you may have guessed given our name, we do love hacks around here, and this one is a great example of making some common, everyday things work in uncommon ways. [Nathan] sent in his hack to detect the door lock position in his basement.

Having a house that dates back to the 1890s, much of it was not very conducive to using off-the-shelf home automation devices. [Nathan] wanted a way to check the status of the basement deadbolt. He went about putting together a custom sensor using some spare parts, including a spare BeagleBone Black. Going full MacGyver, [Nathan] used springs from a ballpoint pen to craft a compliant contact for his sensor.

The pair of springs sat in the door frame and came in contact with the deadbolt; given they are springs, the exact position of the sensor was not very sensitive, as if too close it would just compress the springs slightly more. The springs were wired to the BeagleBone Black’s GPIO, acting as a switch to sense when there was conductivity between the springs through the deadbolt.

This wasn’t just a plug-it-in-and-it-works type of project, mind you; the BeagleBone Black was over 15 ft away from the sensors, lending plenty of opportunity for noise to be introduced into the lines. To combat this, [Nathan] created an RC filter to filter out all the high-frequency noise picked up by his sensor. Following the RC filter, he added in some code to handle the debounce of the sensor, as the springs have some inherent noise in them. Thanks [Nathan] for sending in your resourceful hack; we love seeing the resourcefulness of reusing things already on hand for other purposes. Be sure to check out some of the other repurposed components we’ve featured.

Pulling At Threads With The Flipper Zero

July 15, 2025 by 13 Comments

Gone are the days when all smart devices were required an internet uplink. The WiFi-enabled IoT fad, while still upon us (no, my coffee scale doesn’t need to be on the network, dammit!) has begun to give way to low-power protocols actually designed for this kind of communication, such as ZigBee, and more recently, Thread. The downside of these new systems, however, is that they can be a bit more difficult in which to dabble. If you want to see just why your WiFi-enabled toaster uploads 100 MB of data per day to some server, you can capture some network traffic on your laptop without any specialized hardware. These low-power protocols can feel a bit more opaque, but that’s easily remedied with a dev board. For a couple of dollars, you can buy Thread radio that, with some additional hacking, acts as a portal between this previously-arcane protocol and your laptop — or, as [András Tevesz] has shown us, your Flipper Zero.

He’s published a wonderful three-part guide detailing how to mod one such $10 radio to communicate with the Flipper via its GPIO pins, set up a toolchain, build the firmware, and start experimenting. The guide even gets into the nitty-gritty of how data is handled transmitted and investigates potential attack vectors (less worrying for your Thread-enabled light bulb, very worrying for your smart door lock). This project is a fantastic way to prototype new sensors, build complicated systems using the Flipper as a bridge, or even just gain some insight into how the devices in your smart home operate.

In 2025, it’s easier than ever to get started with home automation — whether you cook up a solution yourself, or opt for a stable, off-the-shelf (but still hackable) solution like HomeAssistant (or even Minecraft?). Regardless of the path you choose, you’ll likely wind up with devices on the Thread network that you now have the tools to hack.

Overengineered Freezer Monitor Fills Market Void

May 19, 2025 by 27 Comments

A lot of projects we see around here are built not just because they can be built, but because there’s no other option available. Necessity is the mother of invention, as they say. And for [Jeff] who has many thousands of dollars of food stowed in a chest freezer, his need for something to keep track of his freezer’s status was greater than any commercial offering available. Not only are freezers hard on batteries, they’re hard on WiFi signals as well, so [Jeff] built his own temperature monitor to solve both of these issues.

The obvious solution here is to have a temperature probe that can be fished through the freezer in some way, allowing the microcontroller, battery, and wireless module to operate outside of the harsh environment. [Jeff] is using K-type thermocouples here, wired through the back of the freezer. This one also is built into a block of material which allows him to get more diffuse temperature readings than a standard probe would provide. He’s also solving some other problems with commercially available probes here as well, as many of them require an Internet connection or store data in a cloud. To make sure everything stays local, he’s tying this in to a Home Assistant setup which also allows him to easily make temperature calibrations as well as notify him if anything happens to the freezer.

Although the build is very robust (or, as [Jeff] himself argues, overengineered) he does note that since he built it there have been some additional products offered for sale that fit this niche application. But even so, we always appreciate the customized DIY solution that avoids things like proprietary software, subscriptions, or cloud services. We also appreciate freezers themselves; one of our favorites was this restoration of a freezer with a $700,000 price tag.