For Home Assistant enthusiasts that are also in the Apple ecosystem, the holy grail has always been full two-way control of your iPhone (or iPad and Mac) and Home Assistant. For the longest time you've been able control Home Assistant from your iPhone, but not the other way around. Until...
This is an updated guide for a complete soup-to-nuts installation of Home Assistant 2026.8 on Proxmox VE 9.x. I walk you through the full installation process, assuming that you have a bare metal mini PC that you want to use as the Proxmox host. I've also included a number of...
If you are a Home Assistant user and would like to trigger Home Assistant automations based on iOS or iPadOS focus mode changes, this post is for you. I walk you through a Sleep focus mode example, but the concepts are the same for any focus mode. I've completely revamped the...
This week Apple released Developer Beta 1 of their suite of '27 operating systems. This means developers now have access to iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27, and more. One of the hundreds of enhancements and new features is very relevant to Home Assistant users. The Shortcuts app on the...
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...
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...
I recently 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 released a Bluetooth IRK (identity resolving key) capture tool and posted it on Github. Grabbing your phone or...
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...