Blog
Guides, reviews, ideas, and real experiences from a live smart home setup.
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I Replaced My Smart Display with a Tablet Running Home Assistant: Here’s What I Built
When my Lenovo Smart Display finally gave up, I didn’t replace it with another smart display. Instead I mounted a Samsung Galaxy Tab S9 FE+ running Home Assistant in kiosk mode. What started as a like-for-like replacement turned into something that does more than I ever expected: local voice control, chore tracking, UniFi doorbell alerts,…
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Blueprint #6: Home Assistant Presence Detection: Building a Bulletproof Approach
Phone-based geofencing is a good start for Home Assistant presence detection. It is not the finish line. Here is how I layer mmWave sensors, UniFi camera detection, car-specific conditions, and a guest mode helper to build a system that actually knows who is home, who just arrived, and who might be in the house when…
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Blueprint #5: Home Assistant Calendar Sync: Pull Your Whole Family’s Schedule Into One Place
Your calendar knows more about your day than any automation you have ever built. Here is how I synced five calendars from Proton, Microsoft 365, and my kids’ sports leagues into Home Assistant using ICS URLs, and what I built with that data once it was all in one place.
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What Your UniFi Cameras Can Actually Do in Home Assistant
Most people buy security cameras to record. I use mine to trigger automations. In this post I’ll walk through how I’ve wired UniFi Protect into Home Assistant to handle package deliveries, doorbell alerts with live snapshots, backyard presence detection, and keeping tabs on Clarke — all locally, all without a subscription.
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The Essential Home Assistant Add-Ons Every User Should Install
There are two stores inside Home Assistant and most beginners only find one of them. This is the list of 10 add-ons actively running in my setup right now: Z-Wave, Music Assistant, the full local voice stack, ESPHome, and the MCP Server that lets AI work directly inside your smart home.
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Be Smart About Your Smart Home: Don’t Forget Your Z-Wave Network
Your Home Assistant backup doesn’t include your Z-Wave network. That’s a separate process entirely — and skipping it could mean resetting and re-pairing every device in your home. Brad Andrews walks through the exact Z-Wave backup process he uses across three controller migrations, none of which cost him a single device.
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The Blueprint: Locking Down Home Assistant With mTLS — So Hackers Can’t Even Find the Door
A login page is not enough protection. Anyone who can reach yours can probe it, fingerprint it, and hammer it. mTLS via Cloudflare Zero Trust fixes that, bad actors get a Cloudflare access denied screen before they ever touch your network. Here is exactly how to set it up, including the iOS profile install and…
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Be Smart About Your Smart Home: Setting Up Home Assistant Backups (The Right Way)
Setting up Home Assistant backups takes less than 15 minutes and could save you days of work. Brad Andrews walks through the exact setup he runs — daily automatic backups to a Synology NFS share and Nabu Casa cloud — plus how to restore when something goes wrong.
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HACS: Unlocking the Home Assistant Community Store (And Staying Safe While You Do It)
HACS is the Home Assistant Community Store, and it is where some of the best integrations and dashboard cards live. Here is how to install it, what I actually run from it, and the honest security conversation most tutorials skip entirely.
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