I have recently enforced a better privacy practice for my smart home devices, that includes creating a new access point for those devices and blocking them of internet access with VLAN.

Since then, my yeelight minas celiing lights goes unavailable whenever I physically switch them off and turn them on afterwards.

One really stupid thing is it needs internet access for using LAN control feature. it's really really dumb.

but at the same time, in this kind of age where everything wants to phone their home, i need to somehow mitigate this in every possible way such as by fooling the devices as if they have access to the internet.

Is this kind of things possible?

thanks!

I am rebuilding my system and I have a few questions related to network set up. I have installed a new Unifi system, set up IoT VLAN and opened port for HA. That part I THINK is right. My questions lie with setting up DuckDNS and Let's Encrypt. I plan on doing more self hosting stuff in the future. Can/Should I be doing things like Dynamic DNS and certificates via an entity outside of HA such as my router or some other container in the "system" or is it better to handle HA's requirements inside of HA itself?

Additionally, in my current config I can only reach the HA brain via the DuckDNS URL. What sort of set up is required to have the unit accessible when the internet is down? Seems with the mobile app it is the URL or nothing. What do I need to be doing for internal access when on local LAN?

I am running it on the HA Blue hardware and I plan to rebuild from scratch if that matters. I am sketchy on the network set up and making sure things are all secure. Bit paranoid lol. So if you have any good set up guides on this portion it would be appreciated. Thanks.

Here's how to automate an Itho mechanical ventilation unit (e.g. CVE ECO 2SP) to auto adjust ventilation speed according to bathroom humidity levels.

All thanks to Arjen Hiemstra's Itho WiFi add-on module (Dutch), and Home Assistant.

We bought a house! And with it, an Itho mechanical ventilation unit that did not yet auto adjust ventilation speed according to bathroom humidity levels.

So, I automated it! See my blog post for details: https://kroon.email/site/en/posts/home-assistant-itho-cve/

All thanks to Arjen Hiemstra's Itho WiFi add-on module (Dutch), and @homeassistant

#homeassistant #opensource #ithodaalderop

Wife gave me a heads up that she expects we'll get a Roomba from her parents for Christmas - most likely a Roomba Max 505 or 705 (or the Costco variations on those).

Looking at the Roomba Integrations page for HA, I saw this line:

It currently does NOT work with the newer x05 Wi-Fi models, such as Roomba 105, 405, and 505

I was wondering if anyone had tinkered with any of those candidate models and had any success getting them to work with HA?

If I were to install window motion sensors, glass break sensors, door sensors, and cameras, I've basically got my own home security system. But how would you go about mimicking the remote monitoring functions that a company such as ADT or SimpliSafe would do?

The type where if your alarm goes off, you get a phone call and are asked for your code word, and if you give the incorrect code word, the police are summoned or whatever.

I see a lot of HA users using the Ring Keypad to arm/disarm their alarm over Z-Wave. I'm suspicious of Amazon, probably overly so. I just tore out a Ring doorbell. Having said that, if this thing can work entirely free of cloud dependencies, it may still work for me.

Can the ring keypad phone home or exfiltrate telemetry data about my network? Does it connect to this Amazon sidewalk network they've created?

I don't want to give Amazon any window into my home.

cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/31434838

Reddit post

HAKboard, a comprehensive Home Assistant integration for Kanboard, a free and open source Kanban project management tool.

• Roadmap
• Repo
• Screenshots

Features:

Interactive Lovelace cards

Integrates project, task and people data into sensor entities

Documented entity schema aids in dashboard and automation development

Supports multiple instances, enabling blue/green deployment

Configurable replication and project filtering settings per Kanboard instance

Zero YAML editing required

Functionality:

In this initial release, it is a one-way sync of Kanboard data into HA, with deep-linking to Kanboard projects from the HA dashboard. It will create an entity for every project that provides aggregate data for tasks, task status, assignees, columns etc.. giving you an excellent birds eye view of your environment, as well as the ability to create automations from the sensor data.

A very near release (see Roadmap in the repo) will introduce the creation of entities for each task and person, and likely others. We wanted to ensure the core entity generation system is rock-solid before opening it up to potentially thousands of new entities and thought it prudent to stagger this functionality.

If you use Kanboard (or want to try it), this turns your HA dashboard into a real-time project hub.

Repo & Docs: https://github.com/aktive/hakboard

⚠️ IMPORTANT INSTALL NOTES: I'm still working through the HACS repo approval process. In the meantime, please follow these instructions if you would like to install (existing Kanboard server required):

HACS > ⚙️ (Top right) > Custom Repositories > Add: https://github.com/aktive/hakboard as type Integration

Configure your Kanboard instance via Settings (Bottom left) > Devices & services > Add (Bottom right) > Search for HAKboard

NOTE: If HAKboard does not appear (either as an integration or a dashboard card), please refresh your browser or restart HA.

I've wanted to illuminate my kick plates for a long time, starting with my master bathroom, and rolling out to my secondary and kitchen

Finally started today, with a 100w 24v converter, and a gledopto ZigBee controller

Installation was easy, and the controller was quickly picked up. I previously installed a GFCI protected outlet under my sink, so I just plugged it into there.

I don't have a motion sensor yet, so it's just a timed automation:

Day: bright white, about 40% brightness Evening: warm white, about 20% brightness After 10: almoast amber, and about 1% brightness, just enough to pee by.

Levoit Air Purifier Integration for ESPHome with link to github page below. Now I patiently wait for the Levoit 6000s Humidifier.

https://github.com/acvigue/esphome-levoit-air-purifier

Supported models:

• Levoit Core 200s
• Levoit Core 300s
• Levoit Core 400s

cross-posted from: https://lazysoci.al/post/37937592

cross-posted from: https://lazysoci.al/post/37937579

TLDR: I learned the hard way that, at some point, my nightly backups were switched to being encrypted. As far as I can tell, it seems like it was part of an update and not a lot of users noticed it. Thankfully (and concerningly?), the key is stored in plain text if you can recover data from your SD card.

A storm came through my area yesterday and caused the power to drop multiple times. The first time, my HA Pi rebooted fine as it always does, but the second time it failed to boot because it couldn't mount the HassOS boot partition.

After work, I pulled the SD card and connected it to a linux VM on my laptop to see if I could recover the backups from it and just restore from a clean install because I didn't want to spend my night chasing down boot issues. The first thing I did was dd to dump the card to an image before I tried to mess with anything. I found the nightly backups, copied them over to my system, briefly tried to fix the boot issues, gave up, and then wiped and reinstalled Home Assistant OS with Raspberry Pi Imager.

Imagine my surprise when I go through the setup process, get to the "Restore from Backup" screen, and I am then prompted to enter the encryption key for my backup. My backup through Nabu Casa also conveniently had an error when I tried to load it, I assume that one is encrypted as well, but I didn't even get that far.

I have always been pretty good about copying encryption keys into my password manager when I get them, so I was really confused when that prompt came up. I tried my account password and a few others that I might have used if it was a key that I set manually, no luck. After some research, the keys are in the form of XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX, which I definitely did not have, and the SD card had already been wiped, so any hope of finding it died.

At that point, it was getting late and I was getting frustrated, so I threw in the towel and gave into doing a fresh Home Assistant, not looking forward to rebuilding my automations and all that fun stuff.

When I woke up this morning, I had the epiphany that I had dumped the SD card as my very first step, so I grabbed the dump, mounted it, did a few find and greps, and found my encryption key in a json file called <mount path>/supervisor/homeassistant/.storage/backup. I copied the key, pulled up the restore page on my blank Home Assistant, put everything in, and it immediately began the restore process and has been happy all day.

Lessons Learned:

1. Save your encryption key and emergency kit at <server>/config/backup/settings
2. Look into remote backups because next time the SD card might be totally dead and I had bad luck with my Nabu Casa backup, I am going to install this Google Drive add on as a simple start
3. You can always trust that someone, somewhere will leave an encryption key in plain text

I've been running Home Assistant for a while and have wifi, zwave and zigbee networks. My zigbee is on a ZBT-1. I was happy until this week.

I bought some ESP32-C6 development boards to learn about ESP32 etc. with the goal of making some zigbee lock sensors (mechanical switch to report if a deadbolt is closed).

When I put the sample zigbee code on the board it won't connect to the network from my study, but if I take it closer to the coordinator it will connect and it continues working if I take it back to my study. The desk in my study is only about 16' from the coordinator but it is through 3 wood framed, gyprock lined, walls.

I know the answer is "probably, maybe", but I'd be interested in any insight people have about optimizing Zigbee networks. I could remove one of the walls from the equation by using a longer USB cable and bringing the ZBT-1 out of the utility closet? I already have routers close to 2 of the 3 doors I want to put my sensors in - I could maybe add a Zigbee lamp near the 3rd location?

The new Home Assistant Connect ZBT-2 is here.

I just bought and setup the Connect ZBT-1 a few weeks ago... 😭

Go back up your HA installation right now.

I, like many others, was running HA OS on a raspberry pi with whatever sd card I happened to have at hand at the time when I started to play with the whole thing.

It has since became a part of my household with light automations and other stuff and with everything going on in life it's been on a back burner to impove automations more, include more data, manage proper backups and so on. And specially the backups are the one I've been slacking on and now I have no one else to blame than myself.

Sd card eventually died yesterday evening and today when I started to study why the server went down but still responded to ping I was greeted with a docker error that exec format is wrong (or something along those lines). At first I thought that maybe some upgrade went sideways and decided to grab a image of the card before messing around it so I have something to come back to which failed almost immediately with IO errors on dmesg.

Gladly I could get a backup off from the card from october, so at worst I lost some automation tweaks on HA side but what I'm still afraid is that I might've lost Z-wave keys. Ddrescue is running on the card right now so I don't have the final results yet but I'm not too hopeful that it'll create a working image.

So, I did what I should've done already ages ago and installed HA on my proxmox server and added that to backup cycle so that's been taken care of properly and now I'm not limited to Rpi3 performance with addons either. I still need to get a new installation for the pi with Z-wave JS due to RaZberry 7 hat but that should be pretty straightforward task, assuming I can retrieve the keys from broken card.

So: Don't be like me, verify that you have proper backups of your stuff.

I just made the switch to a beefier host and I'm trying to figure out what to do with the green I have now that I'm not using.

As the title says, I'm looking for a plug that can measure power consumption, but does not even have a relay to power it on or off. I want it always to be on. The reason is that I'm tired of my smart plugs randomly turning off for no reason, even after I've updated them to the latest firmware version. Heck, I even have an automation in Home Assistant that turns them on again when it happens. I don't even know if what I'm looking for does even exist. I've been looking around and haven't found anything like it. If any of you fine folks know, please shout!

I have an outlet in my bathroom that's above and to the left of my sink and I'm wondering if it would be safe enough to use some of those third reality plugs in it.

They would not be directly exposed to water from the sink or anything like that, but during showers and stuff like that it can get quite humid in that room. And so I'm wondering if that would cause any kind of problem.

https://a.co/d/3M2S9p2

Should I put my smart plugs into the consumption section or the individual devices section on the energy dashboard?

I think that individual devices section is a recent update because I don't remember seeing that when I configured this back in April. I think there was only the consumption section.

I have been running HA on a Pi3b for a few years. It's been a bit flakey the last few months so I'm looking to upgrade to a Pi5. After the replacement I expect to add more items and maybe phase out the Insteon for more Z-Wave.

I plan to "start from scratch". I use an Insteon hub for most switches and 2 garage doors, some Z-Wave switches, a few generic lamp plugs, 2 cheap Matter bulbs, and Alexa for my wife. Maybe 20 devices or so. The only automations are 2 sunset items and one that links a Z-Wave switch to a insteon switchlink. What will be my major pain points for rebuilding?

Or is there a straightforward method to migrate directly?

What kind of problem will this be for my Nabu Casa subscription? Alexa integration?

Or do I try to build first, then decomm the old one? Won't that cause a conflict?

I have an Inovelli White Series Matter+Thread light switch. It has a custom button called Config that you can use for automations. Config is listed under Events in Device Info. I've noticed some unexpected behavior whenever I run sudo docker compose restart.

Here's what happens after compose restart exits.

• Home Assistant WebUI comes up
• Inovelli switch entities become unavailable
• 5 minutes passes in the unavailable state
• Inovelli switch comes back to life, setting all of its entity's values back to what they were before
• Config event fires

The Config event firing on reboot is really bad because it triggers an automation I have that listens for the Config event to fire...

How should I be coding the automation to ignore Config events from reboots? I found some Event docs and also a forum post, but they didn't turn out too helpful.

Here's the automation I came up with based on the links above. Unfortunately, this still triggers the automation on reboot.

alias: Inovelli switch 
description: ""
triggers:
  - trigger: state
    entity_id:
      - event.inovelli_on_off_switch_config
conditions:
  - condition: not
    conditions:
      - condition: state
        entity_id: event.inovelli_on_off_switch_config
        state: unavailable
      - condition: state
        entity_id: event.inovelli_on_off_switch_config
        state: unknown
actions:
  - choose:
      - conditions:
          - condition: state
            entity_id: event.inovelli_on_off_switch_config
            attribute: event_type
            state: multi_press_1
        sequence:
          - action: script.inovelli_switch_turn_on
            metadata: {}
            data: {}
mode: single

Running HA 2025.10.4 in Docker Compose.

I have my old Surface Pro 4 I want to use as a google home like front end and eventually for voice control. I have CachyOS/Arch installed on it, but all the front ends I found seem to require ubuntu/debian and are made exclusively for raspberry pi touch screens.