SmartWings is no stranger to the smart blinds space. For years they have been supporting a variety of smart home protocols including Zigbee, Z-Wave, Matter over Thread, Matter over PoE and Apple Homekit. They were one of the first manufactures to support Matter over Thread smart blinds back in 2023....
Announced at CES 2026, and now available, is the brand new Aqara Camera Hub G350 for USD $139.99. The headline feature of this new smart camera is official support for the Matter v1.5 camera standard. Officially published in November 2025 Matter 1.5 specification now allows platform agnostic integration of video...
Very recently I purchased the Micro-Air EasyStart Flex and via ESPHome, got it connected to Home Assistant. What is the Micro-Air EasyStart Flex? It is an advanced and versatile soft starter, designed for all sizes of residential A/C units up to 6 tons (72,000 BTUs). The EasyStart provides a controlled...
Hot off the press is the brand new Seeed Studio Xiao ESP32-C5. This is the first Seeed Studio Xiao module with 5 GHz Wi-Fi support. Built on the RISC-V architecture, it brings together 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz dual-band Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5 (LE), and IEEE 802.15.4 (Zigbee, Thread) connectivity,...
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...