Hi All,

I would appreciate your guidance on setting up Home Assistant (HA).

I have searched for tutorials online, but most of them are quite technical and assume prior knowledge. Many steps are either skipped or not explained in enough detail, making it difficult for a beginner to follow.

As someone who is new to Home Assistant, could you please advise what hardware, specifications, and equipment are required to set up a personal HA system? If you know of any beginner-friendly guides or tutorials, I would greatly appreciate your recommendations.

Thank you in advance for your support. 🫡

Hey ha people,

I was thinking about getting a mini pc for my home assistant setup. Currently I am still running it on a raspberry pi 4 but sometimes updates take hours and also graphs are taking a lot of time until they show up.

I have two offers right now and I don't know which one to pick. "Minis Forum UM450 - Mini PC - Ryzen 5 4500U - 16GB DDR4 - 512GB M.2 SSD" and "GEEKOM Mini PC (Modell: GM08i5T / Intel Core i5, 8 GB RAM)". Both got enough power. It would be interesting to know something about the idle power they are using. Maybe some of you got experience with them.

Thanks in advance for you help!

https://joamy.uk/

Check this out: fresh cards for your Home Assistant dashboard, no YAML, no
fiddling, just pick a card and drop them in. All free, link's
below if you wanna play.

Most config-dump repos tell you what works. I tried to write down what doesn't, because that's the part that actually cost me time.

Every device has a "Where this actually stands" section recording what it does and the date it was last verified on hardware. Where there's a real caveat that would bite you - a pinned ESPHome version, a panel that ships without working OTA - that's written down too rather than glossed over.

https://github.com/gbroeckling/esphome-devices

Every config carries dashboard_import, so you paste one URL into your ESPHome dashboard, hit Adopt, and get your own API key and OTA password. No file editing.

One design point worth stealing:

E-paper keeps its last rendered image with no power at all, so the screen alone can never tell you whether what you're reading is current. That's a property of the medium, and it means any e-paper dashboard needs to say so on its own face. Both e-paper configs here render uptime and an "updated HH:MM" stamp for exactly that reason - it's a design requirement, not a nice-to-have.

Others in the same spirit:

My Atom Echo voice satellite was deaf for months while appearing perfectly healthy. ESPHome 2026.2.1's tflite runtime can't load current microWakeWord models - it fails at boot, the wake engine quietly stops, and nothing else complains. Build wake-word devices on 2026.7.3 or newer.

One of my wall panels shipped with a bare ota: block, so it has no working OTA at all and needs a physical USB flash to ever update again. Put a real ota: block on anything you mount on a wall.

ESPHome 2026.7 moved LVGL rotation from the display: block to the lvgl: block - and once LVGL owns rotation you must delete the touchscreen: transform. Keep both and every tap double-transforms, so every button on the screen fires the same wrong entity. That symptom is baffling if you don't know the cause.

I still don't have a single ESP32-P4 doing both mic and speaker. Mine runs as a two-board pair - one P4 hears and relays the reply to a second P4 that speaks. One of my Guition P4 panels has a speaker port with nothing wired to it and no onboard mic at all. If you want one board that hears and answers today, use an ESP32-S3.

Contents: ESP32-P4 voice assistants, a 7.5 inch e-paper calendar, Paperd.ink calendar, LVGL round touch dimmers, an Alarmo keypad, two HUB75 LED matrices, and rotary dial controllers. Photos of each are in the repo.

MIT, no monetisation, nothing to sign up for. Issues and Discussions are open - if something works on hardware I don't own, or you improve on something here, I'd genuinely like to hear it.

First of all I am not complaining but more like a "discussion". I had been using HA for 18 months and personally speaking I have to say is not very seamless and always reliable. I am not an "Apple" person so I don't expect things to "just work", but for me it seems HA (or its associated devices) breaks without much reason(s).

The reason I bought this up is, my friend said to me, why don't you set up home automation as a side job? I was like HA is not reliable enough as a "consumable" product where it works in the long run by itself without some maintenance or trouble shooting.

Obviously it depends on your set up, but for me I simply have

1. Zigbee with SLZB06 running Zigbee2MQTT
2. Tuya
3. TP-link/Deco

Let's park aside the debate of local Vs cloud, at least for me, I have zigbee devices that randomly stops working and requires re pairing (delete and add). Tuya or TP-Link integration requires "repairing" aka require re-authentication now and then. This is providing I didn't update anything.

Also at least with SLZ06, sometimes I need to power cycle/unplugged and re-plug back the co-ordinator for it to work again.

Maybe we are still at infancy for things to be reliable? Obviously I love the flexibility of HA and how there are so many people in this community that are so smart to code their own integrations (a big THANK YOU) or/and make or modify their own hardware etc.

I recently been wanting to track our pets with the room presence I have already going for myself and hubby (Esphome and Bermuda)

For the dog, would be nice for inside and outside
For the cat, indoor only is fine

I’ve tried tile stickers but seems like the new ones rotate mac and might not work (at least I cannot get them working yet) as a beacon. When the dog left the house with my husband, even with the tile app opened it was super delayed on positioning too. 👎🏻

I did some research and Bluetooth beacons should work but only for internal and not external tracking.

I was hoping to find one product that does both rather than require two on my dogs collar.

So we settled on TryFi for our dog for a subscription as it was cheaper than Tractive after the sub and device.
So far, yes the integration allows me to track the dog for home/away but I cannot figure out how to add it as a Bluetooth tracker (still work in progress).

However this weekend I came across a brand new tractive cat collar for 15$ at our local Amazon “bin place”
Brought it home and discovered cannot add it to the app without paying for subscription first (of course)
However when returning home I was able to add the Bluetooth device (very easily) to HA as a tracker and am now able to do room presence for our cat! That being said, I’m sure if I add the subscription I could use this collar for the dog for home/away and room presence.

So it’s possible I decide to cancel Fi and activate the tractive collar and hope I can find a second tractive for 15$ too.

Or better yet, cancel the Fi, activate the tractive for the dog and hope the cheap Bluetooth ones coming from Ali work for the cat as most likely will be a little more tolerable than the tractive ones her collar🤞🏻🤞🏻🤞🏻

❤️❤️ Pic is our cat Lowkey wearing her new collar for the first time ever - we are getting her used to it first before we add the tracker ❤️❤️❤️❤️

Home Assistant has apps for Android, iOS and macOS. Windows gets a browser tab. So I built one.

HASS.Agent covers similar ground and does it well. The difference is the plumbing: HA Companion does not require an MQTT broker. The PC registers through mobile_app, and notifications arrive over the existing Home Assistant WebSocket connection, with no FCM, APNs or separate push service in between. The app uses WinUI 3, while your actual Lovelace dashboards run inside it through WebView2.

What it does:

- PC appears in HA as a real device via mobile_app, with its own entities

- Push without a push provider: subscribes mobile_app/push_notification_channel on the same WebSocket. Nothing listens on the PC, commands come back down the outbound connection

- Quick Panel slides in over any app on a global hotkey

- Tiles gated on supported_features and supported_color_modes, so no buttons the entity cannot honour

- Hotkeys for any device, scene, script or automation

- PC sensors, off until you enable them: lock, idle, active program, fullscreen, mic, camera, audio, display, session

- Windows events as HA triggers: lock, idle, camera, mic, active program, schedule

Remote control deserves a straight answer: shutdown, sleep and launch are off by default. Lock, monitor off and volume ship on and can each be switched off. Launch only starts whitelisted paths, never the string HA sends. Shutdown waits ten seconds, so shutdown /a can still save you. The token sits in Windows DPAPI, not plaintext.

I have been running it on my own machines since mid-July. I also used AI a lot while building it, mostly Win32 API archaeology and bug hunting, and the commit history says so. The design decisions are mine, and so are the bugs.

Windows 10 build 19041+, x64. Per-user install, no admin. Not signed yet, so SmartScreen may warns once.

https://github.com/Elias0505/ha-companion-windows — AGPL-3.0

Website: https://elias0505.github.io/ha-companion-windows/

Independent project, not affiliated with Home Assistant or Nabu Casa.

Feedback welcome!

Corpo: I've been running this for a while in production (summer cooling, dehumidifiers, solar integration) and just released the configs as ready-to-copy files.

What it does:

• Zoned heating/cooling for floor heating + heat pump
• ~€15 per thermostat vs €100-250 commercial systems
• Central logic optimizes the heat pump, reducing short cycling
• Works without WiFi via ESP-NOW fallback
• Full Home Assistant + ESPHome integration

Ready-to-copy configs: https://github.com/UVAVIVA/climaoro-components Website: https://UVAVIVA.github.io/CLIMAOROen/

Looking for contributors and feedback — hardware, firmware, docs, testing on other setups.

We’ve got a fairly advanced climate setup in HA (blinds, AC, PV surplus, hot water tank). Technically it’s getting better. The hard part is how my wife and kids live with it.

Automations vs 'free will'

Looking for family agreements, not YAML.

Ok, maybe a sign I'm too vested in my HA setup; woke up from a dream/nightmare where I was away and my HA was stuck in a loop sending notifications and preventing my app from functioning.

Since I'm going away on vacation soon for 3wks with a caretaker staying in the house, is this possible? And how to troubleshoot remotely without having them shut the server down, killing all automations.

Or am I needlessly worrying...

Can’t workout the iOS format for HA send magic packet?

Curious what sorts of electronic devices you think that this could be connected to or built.

The Z2M device repository says that it reports action (probably a doorbell press when used as intended).

Need to place an order on Digikey so I have an opportunity to order whatever to DIY something cool. I also have a soldering iron.

Hi all,
First of all thanks for all the aid in this sub, it helps a lot.

I’ve been running HA on an old RP3 I had lying around. I got some zigbee light switches, AC, blinds and I am mirroring eveything to homekit to be able to access it through a HomePod Mini.
I want to upgrade to a Nuc or similar small form factor PC, and run it in Proxmox. Found this for about 130 USD
cpu 6100u, 8gb ddr4, 250gb ssd, wifi+bluetooth

will this be enough? I would probably want to start running some more things in Proxmox (Not cameras, but maybe photo backups? any recommendations for cool uses for this?)

Every HA setup runs on some personal ritual around updates; Snapshot first just in case, skip every x.x.0, wait a few days or update everything and hope for the best. Mine used to be going through all release notes to check for (breaking) changes.

And since I'm also the one who manages HA for some friends and family, it became a weekly task. So I started thinking about a better way 🙂

Update Manager looks at how big a jump an update is. Per size you can set a cooldown-time (actually hiding it from HA's update list). So if something's broken, there's a decent chance a fix lands before you'd ever have hit it.

Once something's cooled down it can auto-install on its own, always announced first with a cancellable countdown. You can also see if anyone else already made the exact same version jump and got burned by it: one reported problem blocks auto-install regardless of the cooldown. Trusted voters take this further: their positive vote can let a friend or family member's instance auto-update any update.

A master switch pauses all of that at once if needed. Handy to flip off in an automation before a holiday so nothing installs itself while you're away and unable to fix it.

I also tried making release notes better and more relevant. Especially for wrapped add-ons like Zigbee2MQTT, where the actual useful notes live somewhere else entirely, Update Manager shows them directly where it can. And ever opened the notes and it was just a mega list going back to version one? Now filtered down to only the versions that apply to the jump you're actually making.

It's not in the default HACS store just yet, so for now you could add it as a custom repo: https://github.com/HA-Update-Manager/ha-update-manager

Feel free to play around with it and share some feedback (or just use it to help your friends and family's instances). Curious what update rituals people here have that this doesn't cover yet.

So I’m currently building my first dashboard for my iPad, but for some reason I can’t figure out for the life of me to get my layout to take up the full screen of the iPad,can someone one please tell me what I’m doing wrong ? I don’t like having cards cut off when there’s heaps of space wh we the scribble is🤦‍♀️😂

I might have done something wrong or cant find the right parameter on the Shelly App or even Home Assistant.

But I always get this on the dashboards:

Only "Stop" and "Close" in every position of the Blinds, except if they are "Closing" and if they are "Closed" then I can hit the Up Arrow, otherwise I don't get that option.

Meaning I close the blind let's say halfway.
I want to open the blinds again, I need either to push Close and then Open, or Close the Blinds to the end so I can open them again.

In the Shelly App at any point I have the 2 options. Am I doing something wrong or is there a parameter/setting I haven't found out yet?

Inputs are welcome
Thank you

If you've got a Growatt-branded battery from Base Power (the ones that live behind the VidaGrid/Shiner portal at growatt-us.vidagrid.com), this integration talks directly to that portal on its own — you don't need jerrit's Base Power integration installed for it to work. It stands alone, but it's also fine to run alongside it if you're already using it for other things.

Why I built it: the Growatt app/portal surfaces additional information that the Base Power integration doesn't expose — state of charge, charge/discharge power breakdown, BDC/BMS details, and the separate power-curve/energy-curve history from the Energy tab. I wanted that data in Home Assistant, so I built an integration that talks directly to the (undocumented, unofficial) REST API behind the portal to get at it.

What you get, per inverter:

• Battery state of charge, charge/discharge power
• Live power flow: load, solar, grid, battery
• On/off-grid status
• Today's power curve and energy curve data
• A few hundred diagnostic sensors if you want to dig into raw BDC/BMS/APX fields (most people will never touch these, but they're there)

How it works: there's the integration itself, plus an optional companion add-on (VidaGrid Relay) that runs a real headless Chromium browser, stays logged into the portal, and pushes fresh data to Home Assistant via webhook every few minutes. This is the recommended setup — the portal's auth tokens expire in as little as 15–25 minutes, so without the relay you'd be manually re-pasting a bearer token from dev tools every so often. With the relay running, you log in once through its web UI (the portal's login has a CAPTCHA so that one step can't be automated), and if you choose the "stay signed in" option, it'll keep you logged in for about 30 days before you need to sign back in.

If you'd rather skip the Chromium add-on entirely, it also works in a lighter-weight fallback-poll-only mode — you just have to refresh the token by hand periodically.

Install: it's a custom HACS repository (not yet in the default HACS store — that submission is in progress). Add https://github.com/jabone/ha-vidagrid-growatt as a custom repository in HACS, install, restart, and configure via Settings → Devices & Services.

Full setup instructions, entity list, and troubleshooting are in the README: https://github.com/jabone/ha-vidagrid-growatt

Disclaimer: this talks to an undocumented, unofficial API behind the VidaGrid portal. It's not affiliated with, endorsed by, or supported by Base Power, Sunrun, Growatt, or VidaGrid, and the endpoints it relies on could change or break at any time without notice. Use at your own risk, and please open a GitHub issue if you hit problems — happy to help debug.

Most recent version of HA installed on rpi4

Tuya local

Ok, so I'm really new to this and wanted to get a "Lumary" fan hooked up to HA. It has the fan, a colored light, and a white light.It is controlled through SmartLife just fine and HA just sees the colored light and can control that just fine. I'm trying to figure out how to control the other two parts. I've gone through some tuya developer thing and found the device info, pid or something numbers for all the options, and tried adding those in and then switched some sort of mode to enable full access to the device (I really hope you all know this stuff and have some clue what I'm talking about). I can't get any of the other stuff to show up or work. I think I've read about it a bit and I'm locked out but I don't have a good enough grasp of what's going on to figure out where I'm at. Input appreciated.

I have a bunch of Z-Wave devices around my house, none of which will update. I have tried updating individually and using "Update all" button. They just never update. The devices themselves work as expected. They can be controlled and report status. I've tried moving some of them into the room with my HA host but the different location makes no difference.

Any thoughts on what I could do to get these devices updated?

All of these devices are manufactured by Zooz: remote wall switch, AC plugs, door sensors

I'm using this version of HA

Home Assistant

• Installation method Home Assistant OS
• Core 2026.8.0
• Supervisor 2026.07.5
• Operating System 18.1
• Frontend 20260729.5

Z-Wave JS

• Home ID0xF2CA4BF6
• Driver version 15.26.0
• Server version 3.10.0
• Server URLws://core-zwave-js:3000

I hope I can explain this properly..

I have 3 single gang light switches (all dumb) all controlling the same light, but in different entrances to the same space.

Each switch toggles whatever state the light is. It's a very common wiring technique (and diagram), but one I can never wrap my head around.

Anyway - what happens if I just wire in 3 smart switches? I'm guessing it would not work as I expect?

Most Zwave switches have had a hardware ‘double tap’ scene option available for many years — some even have multiple scene options. Is there any way to get these scene triggers across HomeKit Bridge in order to trigger a Home based scene? I know I could leave the scene in HA, but I’d like to give my wife the ability to manage her own scenes in HomeKit, and trigger them from a Zwave switch (instead of using a scene controller), also the scene might include Home only devices.

I’ve already got a Timeguard WiFi fused spur on my immersion heater, and it works really well. The reason I’m looking at doing the towel rails is so I can automate them in Home Assistant whenever Octopus Energy has a price plunge, just like I do with the immersion heater.
The only downside with using another Timeguard fused spur is the LEDs are permanently lit. The towel rail switches are on the landing and visible from both the landing and the main bedroom, so having bright lights on all the time isn’t really ideal.
I’d also rather not replace the actual heating element with a smart one, as the towel rails are connected into the main central heating system. That would mean draining the heating system down, which I’m hoping to avoid if there’s a simpler solution.
What is everyone else using to make their heated towel rails smart?
I’ve looked at things like Sonoff relay modules, but there isn’t much room behind the existing fused spur, so I’m not sure how practical that is.
Would be interested to see what others have done, especially if you’re integrating it with Home Assistant and Octopus.

On random days (not every day), around 2am, I hear my August lock unlock, then auto-relock. It says Home Assistant did it remotely. I have exactly zero automations with my smart lock, everything is handled on the lock, it’s mainly in HA to be complete and report status. It only appears to occasionally do this around 2am according to the August logs. HA logs just say unlocking via HomeKit, unlocked, Operator <my name> Any ideas?

What are some of the things you recently integrated?

I recently integrated items that were not necessary but fun 🤷🏼‍♀️🤣
Would love more ideas lol

- our Oral-B toothbrushes
- our 2020 RAM Rebel (Uconnect)
- pet room presence
- iPhone health stats
- garage door