Category: The Blueprint Series
Step-by-step roadmaps for building a smart home on Home Assistant. Each Blueprint takes you from zero to working setup, built from a real installation running 200+ automations and 2,600+ connected entities. Start with Blueprint #1 and work through the series at your own pace.
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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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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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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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Proton Drive, Docs, and Sheets Review: Is It Ready to Replace Google Drive?
Google Drive is convenient, free, and deeply integrated into everything but it also means Google can read every file you store there. Proton Drive offers the same cloud storage experience with end-to-end, zero-knowledge encryption baked in. I’ve been using it for photo backup, personal files, and Smart Home Secrets content. Here’s the honest review of…
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Be Smart About Your Smart Home: Why Backups Matter (And Why You Can’t Have Too Many)
You’ve spent months building your smart home — the automations, the integrations, the routines your family relies on without even realising it. But what happens when something fails? Brad Andrews shares why a layered Home Assistant backup strategy is the single most important thing you’re probably not doing properly yet.
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Proton Password Manager Review and Setup: A Password Manager Built for the Privacy-Conscious
I’ve used more password managers than most people know exist — TrueKey, PasswordBoss, Keeper, 1Password, PasswordState, Enpass, and now Proton Pass. Two years in, my whole family is on it. This is an honest review of what it gets right, where it still has gaps, and how it stacks up against the best alternatives.
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Home Assistant Zones & Geofencing: The Setup That Tells My Wife When the Kids Are at School
Zones are one of the simplest things in Home Assistant and one of the most useful. Once you set them up properly — with the right radius, the right conditions, and a couple of well-built automations — your phone becomes the trigger for things your family will actually notice. Here is how to do it…
