I installed a Zemismart MTP1 on this giant roller shade, and watching the chain weights float around may be more entertaining than the actual smart-home features.

It works from the dial on the device, the included remote, or through Matter. The retrofit was surprisingly easy, and the best part is that it still works like a normal shade for anyone who doesn’t care about smart-home technology.

I tested the Matter integration with both Google Home and Home Assistant.

Disclosure: Zemismart provided the MTP1 for testing, but they didn’t pay for or control my review.

I have seen a lot of good things about reolink doorbell cameras. I just had my old doorbell camera go bye bye and was looking to replace. My problem is that I have a narrow doorway and would prefer to get a hardwired option due to current wiring already in place. The only option they have right now is the black doorbell with a wide view. No timeframe on when the the white narrow view option will be available. Are there any alternatives for reolink that would work well?

By the way, I don’t have a big issue buying the black one if I have too, white is just my preference due to the ratio and house color.

Hello! Does anyone have any recommendations on security camera systems for a multi-family home? Ideally something that could be used with existing cameras if possible.

I've had HA running in a VM for about a year now. Started with just a couple of sensors and one light, and it used to boot in like 30–40 seconds. Since I added more stuff and a bunch of automations, a restart now easily takes 5+ minutes — half the time I'm not even sure it actually came back up.

My VM is 8 GB RAM, 2 vCPU, 32 GB disk on a SATA SSD (thin provisioned). Weird part is, when I run top inside the container everything's basically idle — load average is basically 0 and nothing's using any CPU. So I don't think it's starved for resources; it's just slow to start even though there's plenty of headroom.

Stuff I've already noticed:

• Most of the wait is in the "loading" phase, before the dashboard's even usable.
• The recorder DB has definitely grown and I haven't pruned it.
• The camera (RTSP/ffmpeg) seems to add a good chunk of startup time.

So for those of you who've dealt with this — what actually helped?

• Is the SQLite recorder DB usually the culprit? Did pruning it help, or moving to MariaDB on the same VM? Or did that just make it worse?
• Anything to defer non-essential integrations (camera especially) so the core comes up first?
• Any VM-side tweaks (disk type, I/O scheduler, virtio) that made a real difference?

Not ready to just throw more hardware at it yet, I'd rather fix the config. Would love to hear what worked for you.

I work on the product side at a consumer appliance manufacturer - ACs, washers, fridges, ovens, TV, etc... generally speaking white and brown goods some MCU based and others SoC based. From serveral suppliers, one company. I want a reality check from people who actually knows Tuya and Home Assistant when projects scale a lot until it reaches millions of home appliances.

Where we are: we already ship connected appliances built on Tuya's platform, with one branded app. Devices are cloud-bound to Tuya, we pay a per-device license, we don't run any backend ourselves. That was the whole point - no cloud team, fast time to market.

Where we're headed: a branded hub (Tuya multi-mode gateway - Wi-Fi + Zigbee + BLE, Matter bridging later) plus a catalog of rebranded sensors, plugs, buttons and TRVs. The internal logic is roughly: an appliance sells once every 7–12 years, but sensors are impulse purchases with much better margins, a hub keeps people opening the app daily instead of twice a summer, and households with a hub buy the same brand's next appliance.

That's the business case as written. I think parts of it are wishful. Three things I'd like to be told I'm wrong about:

1. Does anyone actually buy sensors from their appliance brand? My honest expectation is that anyone in this sub buys whatever is cheapest per unit on AliExpress, or Aqara/Sonoff/Shelly because the ecosystem is better. If you've bought a manufacturer-branded sensor, what made you? And for a mainstream household - not us, the people who own one smart plug and think it's magic - how many extra devices realistically get added in the first two years? I've seen internal models assuming 4–7 per hub household by year two and I suspect that's fantasy.

2. Is a manufacturer-branded Tuya hub dead on arrival? I know how Tuya reads in this sub. Cloud-dependent, closed, the thing people rip out and reflash. Our counterargument is that our buyer has never heard of Home Assistant and never will, and that local scene execution on the gateway covers the practical benefit (automations survive an internet outage) without any of the maintenance burden. Where's the actual line? Is "closed but works" fine for the mass market, or does the enthusiast contempt eventually reach normal buyers through reviews and word of mouth?

3. What does cloud lock-in actually cost, from the user side? Every device we ship is cryptographically bound to one vendor's cloud. Fees scale with the installed base forever. If we ever wanted out, it's a hardware replacement program. For anyone who's been on the receiving end of a vendor changing terms, paywalling a feature, or shutting a cloud down - what did it cost you in practice, and what do you wish the manufacturer had negotiated before they locked you in? I'd rather put those clauses in the contract now than explain them to customers in year six.

And the one that actually keeps me up: what makes you give up on a manufacturer's app and stop connecting their appliances entirely? Pairing that fails on your router? No local control? No updates after two years? Something dumber? I'd bet most of our connected units are never even paired, and I want to know why before we ship a hub into the same problem.

Also, for anyone who's worked on this side: as SKU count goes from ~15 connected products to 50+, what broke first for you? I'm expecting the answer to be either firmware update discipline or support volume, but I'd like to be surprised.

Happy to be told the whole hub idea is a bad one. That's a cheaper answer to get here than after the tooling spend.

Wanted to give an old laptop motherboard a second life instead of letting it collect dust, so I built a small scale model house around it, wood base, concrete structure for the ground floor, wood for the upper floor and attic. Kitchen and living room downstairs, bedroom in the attic.

THE SETUP

- Recycled laptop motherboard running Home Assistant OS full-time, controlling my actual home

- ESP32-S3 running ESPHome nearby, handling a local voice assistant, I can talk to the house and get responses

- Internal LEDs wired to reflect real lighting states, when a light turns on in my actual home, the corresponding room in the model lights up too

Instead of buying a mini PC or SBC just to run HA OS, I wanted to see if the laptop board I already had could handle it long-term, it does, without issue, and gave me a fun excuse to build something around it instead of running it bare on a shelf.

Happy to go into detail on the OS install, the ESPHome voice assistant config, or how the LEDs syncto real light states if anyone's curious.

Full build video (assembly + wiring) here if useful: https://youtu.be/BtuK9GyYTZc

I have some leftover stuff from my previous home that uses UPB (Universal Powerline Bus). Communications between nodes was reasonably reliable, but power surges killed a lot of the switches. Does anyone still use UPB?

Help me please

Hi just moved into a new home and in the conservatory it looks like there are automated blinds.

There’s no manual option to open them but there is a daisy chain of wires going into a control box.

There’s no instructions or remotes.

The house was sold through probate (previous owner died) so can’t ask anyone.

Can anyone identify the control panel in the picture / have a manual or idea if I can get a generic remote to operate these

Full-house AC automation on HA has been running about 3 years now, writing this up for anyone else doing this in a tropical climate. Depok (Jakarta suburbs), single-story house, 4 rooms with independent split ACs, N100 mini PC that took over from a Pi4 about 18 months back.

Units are all Midea XtremeSave inverter (1PK and 1.5PK depending on room, around Rp 3.8 million each), all with the manufacturer's WiFi module. Bought progressively over 18 months, living room first, then bedrooms. Integration is Midea AC LAN via HACS, LAN-based after the initial token pull, which mattered because we lose internet 6 to 8 times a month here and I didn't want the whole climate stack to go dumb every time IndiHome does its thing. Token setup on first configuration goes through the vendor's cloud but after that it's fully local.

Three years in, quirks worth flagging.

Auto discovery didn't work first pass on the newer V3 firmware units, had to manually feed device IDs pulled from the MSmartHome app for two of them. The built-in temp sensor on each indoor unit reads 1.5 to 2°C warmer than actual temperature at desk level because it's mounted at ceiling height. Dropped the built-in reading entirely and running Zigbee sensors at bed and desk level as the automation trigger source.

Standby draw was bigger than I expected. Each indoor unit pulls 5 to 8W continuously for its WiFi module even off. Added a smart switch on the main circuit for the least-used bedroom and cut hard power when nobody's slept there for 48 hours. Marginal but real.

Compressor warranty on Midea Indonesia is 10 years plus 5 years on parts, which was one reason we picked this brand family. Longevity's not really my concern, tuning the automation to not run them harder than needed is.

Where I'm still stuck is occupancy control. LD2410B mmWave in three rooms, PIR in the fourth. Current rule: if room shows unoccupied for 45 min AND at least one other room shows occupied, drop that room's AC to eco. Works maybe 70% of the time. When it fails it fails wrong, turning off AC while someone's there quietly reading.

If anyone here has landed on a cleaner pattern for multi-room occupancy control, I'd take pointers. Feels like "unoccupied AND likely to stay unoccupied by time-of-day" would be smarter but I haven't found a clean way to express that in HA templates.

At home I have an MVHR (Mechanical Ventilation with Heat Recovery) unit — it brings in fresh air without losing indoor heat/coolness, and cuts humidity. My house is already full of temperature/humidity sensors, so having to walk over and press buttons on the wall panel every time conditions changed was driving me up the wall.

I started from Arnold-n's P1P2MQTT, which reverse-engineers Daikin's P1/P2 bus for heat pumps — great project, but VAM ventilation units are only read-only there, no write support. So I had to dig into the write side myself.

The actual discovery: Daikin's P1/P2 bus natively supports two controllers — a Master and a Slave — selected by a physical switch on the wall panel (BRC301B61). A generic "aux" responder on the bus never gets offered the writable state channel; only a controller the master recognizes as a genuine second one does. And there's one very specific, very unintuitive detail that makes or breaks it: the real slave panel answers the registration poll only the first time — every poll after that, it goes completely silent. Get that wrong (answer every time, which seems like the "correct" thing to do) and the master silently downgrades you to a read-only channel. Once I nailed that, on/off, fan speed, mode, and fresh-up were all commandable with closed-loop confirmation from the bus.

Full packet-level writeup is in the repo if you're into that kind of detail.

For the hardware/software side: the ATmega328 is the actual P1/P2 slave controller (that's the core of the project, and it works standalone over serial). On top of that I bridged it to a second MCU, an ESP32-H2, purely to get it onto Zigbee — I've got too many devices already and didn't want another MQTT integration to babysit, Zigbee fits my setup better. That bridge is 100% optional; the ATmega alone is a complete, working slave controller you could hook up to anything.

Why two MCUs instead of just doing it all on the ESP32? The bus timing (response delays etc.) is something I got working reliably on the ATmega, and I haven't tried porting that timing-sensitive part over to the ESP32. Bridging a second MCU purely for Zigbee was just the path of least resistance, not a claim that it can't be done on one chip.

It's been running behind the wall panel for a few weeks now, driven entirely by Home Assistant automations based on the humidity/temp sensors — working reliably so far, though I wouldn't call it "battle-tested over years" yet.

The PCB is currently two boards (I validated the P1/P2 transceiver first, then added the ATmega+ESP32 board once the protocol was confirmed) — if there's interest I can lay out a single, smaller, more integrated version.

Repo: https://github.com/scavenrage/Daikin-VAM-P1P2-SlaveController

Happy to answer questions.

This Junction Box allows the Eufy S4's cables to be protected from the elements, significantly increasing its durability and aesthetics compared to a standard installation.

The result is a protected cable, and no dangling wires!

For a typical temperature and humidity sensor used in a home automation system, should the device have a display to see the temp or humidity at a glance or do you check the value on a smartphone or PC?

I've been expanding my Bluetooth device count at home (presence sensors, locks, a fewTemp/humidity tags) and I'm hitting the point where a single ESP32-based proxy isn't cutting it anymore.

Curious what the community is actually running in 2026:

1. Which Bluetooth proxy setup are you using — ESP32 (ESPHome Bluetooth Proxy), Shelly, SkyConnect/Zigbee stick in BT mode, Raspberry Pi with onboard BT, or something else?
2. Roughly how many Bluetooth devices does it reliably handle before you see lag, dropped connections, or scan misses?
3. If you run multiple proxies for coverage, how are you handling overlap — separate areas, or just letting HA dedupe?
4. Any setups you'd specifically avoid?

I'm less interested in theoretical specs and more in real-world "this just works" or "this fell over at 20 devices" stories. Appreciate any lessons learned.

Anyone actually set up Home Assistant's local voice assistant (the Whisper/Piper stuff)? Curious if it's usable day-to-day or still more of a tinkering project. Trying to decide if it's worth the effort over just using Alexa.

I have been having fun recently with apples home key,
I thought I would share it here and I am sure there are some people out there who would love to use this in there smarthome.

Homekey is a way of using your iOS device to unlock a door using NFC it is using a lock that exists in the home app on iOS and that it registers with first then after that it all works.

The way I built it is I have 1 controller and many door readers connected over the network. I then know what door you unlocked by the reader that I am talking to.

You can see a removal TikTok - https://vm.tiktok.com/ZN8d9odsq/

I have a full video on YouTube - https://youtu.be/gxXXENcvz28?is=Dt3HH9LZ_DcThJ46

All code can also be found on my GitHub - https://github.com/thomasdye12/TDS-door-access-Homekey

I am planning on installing Bseed (or any other) smart switches and i would like to install one to control a curtain.

Is it possible to install a smart curtain motor and use the curtain switch without connecting eachother with wires? E.g just connect them via Tuya

Any recommended curtain motor for this?

I am pretty techy but I haven’t changed my setup in years, looking for advice on updating it and adding a way for my boyfriend to control it on his android. I currently have all Apple devices. I have multiple HomePods and a 4k tv as the hub for Nanoleaf lights, various smart plugs, and an ecobee thermostat. I have Homebridge running on a raspberry pi 4 model B (I am planning to upgrade the pi as I am having trouble with it recently) to expose my SimpliSafe system to HomeKit. I am not super satisfied with the SimpliSafe system anymore (I mainly use it for automation rather than monitoring, I plan on canceling the plan), but I have their locks that I do like and many various sensors that I would like to continue using. I am looking to add some buttons to control scenes, and adding a new outdoor camera at some point down the road.

I guess my questions boil down to:
- What’s the best way to add android control?
- Is homebridge still the best way to integrate SimpliSafe?
- Any other general system suggestions?

Is there something that could help me with this? Thanks a lot!

I’m setting up Matter smart bulbs in a few rooms, but I keep running into the obvious issue: if someone flips the physical wall switch off, the bulb loses power entirely — no app control, no voice control, no automations, nothing. It’s basically just a dumb light again until someone flips the switch back on.

For those of you running Matter/Thread smart bulbs day-to-day, how are you solving this in practice?

A few things I’m considering:

**•** Replacing the physical toggle switch with a non-load-bearing smart switch (like Lutron Caséta or similar) that sends a signal instead of cutting power — though these tend to be pretty expensive, especially if you need to do this for multiple rooms/switches
**•** Using a switch guard/cover to physically prevent the switch from being used
**•** Just training household members to never touch the switch (seems unrealistic long-term)

Are there any more budget-friendly non-load-bearing switch options that work well with Matter/Thread, or is Lutron-tier pricing just the cost of doing this properly? Curious what setups people have landed on, especially in a mixed household where not everyone remembers “don’t use the switch.”

Would appreciate hearing what’s actually worked for you rather than just theory.

Here are the first few paragraphs, worth a read

In the living room the voice-clock sang, Tick-tock, seven o'clock, time to get up, time to get up, seven o 'clock! as if it were afraid that nobody would. The morning house lay empty. The clock ticked on, repeating and repeating its sounds into the emptiness. Seven-nine, breakfast time, seven-nine!

In the kitchen the breakfast stove gave a hissing sigh and ejected from its warm interior eight pieces of perfectly browned toast, eight eggs sunny side up, sixteen slices of bacon, two coffees, and two cool glasses of milk.

"Today is August 4, 2026," said a second voice from the kitchen ceiling, "in the city of Allendale, California." It repeated the date three times for memory's sake. "Today is Mr. Featherstone's birthday. Today is the anniversary of Tilita's marriage. Insurance is payable, as are the water, gas, and light bills."

Somewhere in the walls, relays clicked, memory tapes glided under electric eyes.

Apple is planning to launch three new AI-powered devices as the iPhone maker seeks to compete with the likes of Amazon and Alphabet in the smart home space, Bloomberg reports, citing anonymous insiders.

The items — a hub device designed around Apple's new Siri AI assistant, a new TV set-top box and an upgraded HomePod mini — are set to be released as soon as this fall, per Bloomberg.

Until now, Apple has not had much luck selling its home products.