I've recently gone down the ESPHome rabbit hole with Home Assistant. My primary uses cases are Bluetooth proxies and capturing Bluetooth IRKs for room-level presence detection. In this post I cover three popular Seeed Studio ESP32 devices: C3, C6 and S3. I've created Github repos for each model to simplify...
This blog post will walk you through updating the Aqara FP300 firmware when using it in Zigbee mode with Home Assistant. The process is a little cumbersome, as you can't (yet) do it directly in Home Assistant via Zigbee2MQTT. As of January 18, 2026 we are now on firmware 5841. ...
A few weeks ago I wrote a blog post on how to track who's in each room of your house using Home Assistant and the Bermuda BLE Trilateration add-on. As part of that project, I vibe coded a Bluetooth IRK Capture tool and released it on Github. Grabbing your phone...
This post covers my vibe coding experience to create an open source ESPHome Bluetooth IRK (Identity Resolving Key) capture tool. Many modern smart devices—including iPhones and Apple Watches—use Bluetooth Resolvable Private Addresses (RPA) to protect your privacy. Instead of broadcasting a fixed Bluetooth address that could be used to track you,...
Unlike general presence detection, room-based location detection with Bluetooth can tell you who, or what, is in each room. This is great for highly customized automations with Home Assistant, that could, for example, set room lighting or the temperature based on who is in the room not just the mere...
With the large amount of digital data that people consider important, safeguarding your critical data against catastrophic loss is more important than ever. Whether it's a natural disaster, hardware failure, or a cyberattack, the potential for data loss is large. Protecting precious photos, financial documents and other personal or business...
This blog post will walk you through jailbreaking your Echo Show 5 Gen 1 & 2, or Echo Show 8 Gen 1, wiping Amazon's Fire OS, and loading Lineage Android. You can then install the Home Assistant companion app, View Assist, Fully Kiosk or whatever you want to display your...
The Aqara FP300 is the new kid on the block when it comes to smart home presence sensors. But the FP300 does not just do presence sensing, but also supports temperature, humidity and light sensors. What really makes this device exciting is that it's battery powered! I've been eagerly waiting...
Hot off the press is Proxmox Backup Server 4.0. PBS is a great tool to use with your Proxmox VE servers to do fast and easy backups of your VMs and LXCs. It's very easy to setup, and can be deployed in a variety of forms: bare metal, VM or...
Many home labs have both Proxmox VE hosts (for running VMs and LXCs) as well as a Synology NAS. If you want to run Proxmox Backup Server on your Synology NAS as a VM, this post is for you. I'll show you how to install PBS as VM on your...
New to Proxmox Backup Server (PBS) 4.0 is a 'tech preview' feature for using S3 buckets as a datastore. While many people associate S3 buckets with Amazon, it is more or less a standard that many cloud providers support. This opens up many possibilities for direct PBS to cloud backups,...
If you have a Synology NAS and want to use it with Proxmox Backup Server (PBS), you have two primary options for your datastore: NFS or an iSCSI LUN. If you want to use NFS storage, check out my previous article: How To: Setup Synology NFS for Proxmox Backup Server...