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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
One of the most common automations that people use probably use Home Assistant for is lighting. Several months ago I stumbled on an amazing collection of Home Assistant blueprints by community member Blacky (Craig Black). They do more with light automation than I ever thought possible. The best part is that...
For Home Assistant users that want hyper local weather information, the 2023 ECOWITT Wittboy Weather Station GW2001, with Wittboy Wi-Fi Hub is an excellent choice. Unlike a traditional weather station that you might be thinking of, the Ecowitt Wittboy is solid state with no moving parts.If you are using Home...
In this final installment of my smart home deep dive on Matter and Thread, I cover a ton of practical advice on how to set yourself up for success with Matter. Even if you aren't using Home Assistant and are entirely into Apple Home, Google Home, etc. the last section...