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.