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...
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...
If you are a Home Assistant user and would like to trigger Home Assistant automations based on iOS Focus Mode changes, this post is for you. In iOS 18 and earlier all focus modes except Sleep can use built-in personal automations to trigger Home Assistant actions based on the Focusing being...
Matter over Thread (MoT) is a recent addition to the smart home ecosystem. Unlike more established protocols such as ZigBee and Z-Wave, MoT is still in its early stages and may present some challenges. This post will outline several key areas to consider for maintaining optimal Thread network stability:Matter Multi-Admin...
Thanks to kickstarter a few weeks ago I got my Aqara U200 Matter over Thread smart lock with Apple Homekey support. I've been waiting a long time for a smart lock to support the full feature set that I wanted. The primary features I wanted were Matter over Thread (not Wi-Fi...