Category: Secrets & Hidden Features
The settings vendors bury, the automations nobody talks about, and the integrations most people never find. Every post in this category reveals something genuinely useful that takes real digging to uncover.
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Every Z-Wave Switch in My House Does Two Jobs: Here’s How
Most people install a Z-Wave dimmer and stop at on and off. But the same switch you use every day can trigger a second layer of completely separate automations, and even change colour to tell you something. Here’s how I use multi-tap, scene keys, and LED status across my office, kitchen, deck, master bedroom, and…
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10 Intermediate Home Assistant Automations, Pulled From My System
These are the automations that do a little more thinking. Each one is pulled from my live setup, includes copy-paste YAML, and adds just enough logic to make a real difference. If you have the beginner list running, this is your next step.
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How I Turned a TRMNL Into a Fully Local Home Assistant Display: No Cloud Required
The TRMNL display ships with firmware that tries to phone home the moment it boots. You don’t need a TRMNL account to use the hardware. Here’s how I bypassed the cloud entirely, flashed ESPHome over a 9-second window, and built a fully local weather and calendar dashboard, with two layout options you can choose from.
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Fine-Tuning Your Home Assistant Conversation Agent Pre-Prompt: Why Clarity Beats Length
You wrote a clear rule. The agent ignored it. Before you blame the LLM, check whether Home Assistant intercepted the command before Claude ever saw it. This is the meta-article behind my local voice series: what I learned about writing a conversation agent pre-prompt that actually behaves, plus the full annotated prompt I run today.
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10 Easy Home Assistant Automations You Can Build Today, Pulled From My System
These are not made-up examples. Every automation in this list runs in my home right now. I pulled the 10 easiest ones from my setup, cleaned up the YAML, and documented exactly how to build them yourself. Copy, swap your entity IDs, and you are done.
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Home Assistant Voice PE Timers: Exposing Them, Displaying Them, and Getting Notified
The Voice PE stores timers entirely on the device. Home Assistant has no idea they exist. This guide covers the ESPHome fix that exposes your timer to HA, wires up the kitchen tablet overlay, sends iOS notifications on completion, and explains how to customize which timers show where.
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Turn a Raspberry Pi and Stream Deck Into a Physical Home Assistant Launchpad
A Pi5 sitting on a shelf. A Stream Deck collecting dust for years. One sick day at home with my son that finally made me sit down and do it. Here is exactly how I turned idle hardware into a 22-button Home Assistant launchpad, with story time for the kids, a Z-Wave DND toggle, and…
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What Home Assistant Voice Handles Locally, and What Still Needs an AI
I spent an afternoon trying to teach Claude how to broadcast messages through my house before realising Home Assistant was intercepting the command before Claude ever saw it. That one mistake taught me something most voice assistant guides never cover. Knowing which commands belong local and which ones belong to an LLM is the foundation…
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Blueprint #7: Local Voice Control & Ditching Google Home for Piper, Whisper, and openWakeWord
I had been putting off replacing Google Home for years. When my Lenovo Smart Display died, I finally built what I had always wanted a fully local voice assistant using Piper, Whisper, and openWakeWord. This is the complete blueprint, including the wake word problem I did not expect, the Proxmox fix that eliminated latency, and…
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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,…
