Home Assistant

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/RemarkableAnnual1481 on 2026-02-18 13:19:43+00:00.

I’ve been putting together a playlist of shorts, beginner‑focused Home Assistant shorts videos — quick tips, simple automations, and small wins that help new users get started without feeling overwhelmed.

I’d love to tap into the community’s experience:

What topics, tips, or “I wish I knew this earlier” moments would you recommend for new Home Assistant users?

Maybe it’s:

• a simple automation beginners should try first
• a feature that’s often overlooked
• a common setup mistake
• something that finally made HA “click” for you

Here’s the playlist so far if you want to see what I’ve covered:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgFmYLxo1n9vvZyvo0PTHiNXVgnI4h-qu

Thanks in advance — your suggestions will help shape the next batch of Shorts and hopefully make onboarding easier for newcomers.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/Zi05 on 2026-02-18 13:15:01+00:00.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/Sschaffer24 on 2026-02-18 04:08:31+00:00.

Hey all!

Fairly common around here, I’m sure, but I’m looking for some guidance from the community in possibly moving on from my ring system.

I currently have a monitored alarm system (contact sensors, keypads, water sensors and first alert smoke/co alarms) and Ring cameras around my house.

Overall, I’m happy with the service and like the peace of mind the monitoring service provides, but in the interest of security (and cost) I’m considering bringing everything local.

I’m trying to figure out what I’d need to do to convert my ring hardware into local hardware. I have a z-wave dongle and know how to pair the devices to HA so that’s no issue. I also am aware I can do most alarm components using Alarmo (haven’t messed with it so not sure how feature rich this is, I just know it’s recommended). But I’m trying to determine if the smoke alarms would be able to remotely monitored (I have two dogs at home and if something would happen being able to get an alert and call 911 is important to me, as well as some version of CO monitoring).

I also use their cameras all around my home and want to move to a local solution. I’m not interested in running cable for a POE setup, so something wireless/battery is important. What is recommended here? Reolink?

All in all, I don’t mind the setup I have or the cost, I just want the best system overall and to protect my security as much as possible. Any input/guidance is appreciated!

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/rgnyldz on 2026-02-18 09:08:21+00:00.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/Taggytech on 2026-02-18 08:50:44+00:00.

I started experimenting with NFC as simple physical triggers and was surprised how useful they can be in real life.

Not the obvious stuff like opening apps — but things like:

• silent alarm disarm when leaving home

• context-aware scenes (time + presence based)

• resetting maintenance counters

• tracking daily routines

It made me realize NFC works best not as a “command”, but as an intent signal that automation logic interprets.

Curious what weird / unexpected / clever uses people here came up with.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/mfmfantasycpl on 2026-02-17 20:24:54+00:00.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/ApolloAutomation on 2026-02-17 13:41:07+00:00.

I ran across this post yesterday and now I'm wondering what other use cases people have and how they've overcome them. Can you all share ways that you, your family, or others living in your home have benefit from smart home automations? Specifically when considering accessibility?

Are there any issues that feel "unsolvable" because a product doesnt exist yet or seems too DIY for what you're comfortable with? Post these too - others might be able to help with suggestions or share links to projects that already exist but are not well known!

The Home Assistant Podcast had a guest on last year where they went over a few great ideas as well!

I'm excited to see what some of you are already doing to help others!

Thanks,

Brandon

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/joes30291 on 2026-02-17 10:42:51+00:00.

I walk into my office in the morning, coffee in hand, and sit down at my desk. Thanks to Deskflow, I only need to jiggle one mouse, but I need to jiggle it (or press a key) to wake up the three systems I work on every day.

I've got a PIR sensor by my desk, so being able to send a wake signal to my systems should be easy - why shouldn't I have the screens fully woken by the time I sit down at my desk?

Turns out it's a bit complex - I've got Windows and Ubuntu systems here, and the HA Desktop Companion and HA Linux Companion didn't offer much in the way of simulating a mouse jiggle. There's also the logic in terms of when those systems might be turning off their displays, and avoiding annoying extra jiggles when the sensor updates while working.

So I ended up making ha-display-wake - a simple listener for Linux and Windows that will connect to MQTT, listen to the sensor you specify, and then decide whether to simulate a mouse jiggle based on the screen timeout parameters it read and you confirmed when running for the first time, invoking the setup process.

It'll install itself as a service or scheduled task, and quietly just... turn the screens on when the sensor updates. No need to wake anything up manually anymore.

I've tried to keep it as simple as possible and it's under an MIT license. I'd love to hear if this is useful for others, and your feedback.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/droidonomy on 2026-02-17 05:23:13+00:00.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/FezVrasta on 2026-02-17 12:47:17+00:00.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/carrot_gg on 2026-02-17 11:56:31+00:00.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/daniele_rognini on 2026-02-17 09:59:06+00:00.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/edc1591 on 2026-02-16 23:39:43+00:00.

Hey everyone!

I built a custom integration that lets you share any Home Assistant camera with someone using just a PIN code. No HA account required — they just get a URL and a PIN.

The problem: I wanted to give a family member access to our baby camera, but only when we wanted them to have it, and without making them an HA user. Couldn't find anything that did this cleanly.

What CamPass does:

• You create a "share" through the HA integrations UI — give it a name, set a PIN, pick which cameras to include
• It generates a URL like http://your-ha:8123/campass/baby-cam/
• The person visits the link, punches in the PIN on a little iPhone-style lock screen, and gets a live stream
• Each share has its own switch entity, so you can toggle access on/off from your dashboard or automations
• Supports multiple shares — different PINs and cameras for different people

Some details:

• 3 auth types: 4-digit, 6-digit, or alphanumeric password
• HLS streaming via HA's stream component (falls back to MJPEG)
• Real-time disable — if you flip the switch off, their stream cuts almost immediately (SSE, not polling)
• Switch state persists across restarts
• JWT auth cookies, configurable expiry
• Mobile-first UI

Use cases I had in mind:

• Baby monitor for grandparents/family
• Pet cam for a dog walker
• Temporary guest access

It's free, open source, MIT licensed. Works with HACS as a custom repository.

GitHub: https://github.com/evandcoleman/campass

Would love feedback — this is v0.1.0 so there's definitely room for improvement. Happy to hear what features would be useful.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/Drunk_Panda_456 on 2026-02-16 19:12:08+00:00.

Just a heads-up: always double-check that your Home Assistant backups are full and not just partial snapshots.

I ran into trouble while trying to fix an issue with Alexa Media Player. Apparently, the problem was that the Python version was too new for the add-on. Things got worse when I tried downgrading my Home Assistant core—my backups were all partial, so restoring didn’t help.

Eventually, I realized I had to start from scratch. While trying to refresh my Odroid N2+, I even managed to let out the magic smoke… 😅

I’ve ordered a Home Assistant Green and a ZBT-1 for a clean restart.

TL;DR: Periodically check that your Home Assistant backups are complete so you’re not caught off guard.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/digoben on 2026-02-16 19:00:35+00:00.

I'm trying to update Supervisor from version 2026.02.1 to 2026.02.2 and I get:

Failed to perform the action update/install. Error updating Home Assistant Supervisor: Update of Supervisor failed: toomanyrequests: retry-after: 7.51µs, allowed: 44000/minute

I don't see anything unusual in my adguard dns request log. Definitely not "many requests". What can be the problem here?

EDIT: formatting

UPDATE: After trying several times, every couple of minutes, the Supervisor was eventually updated.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/ktaragorn on 2026-02-16 23:26:54+00:00.

TL;DR - set discovery_unique_id_generator: mac as a safe default when configuring MQTT for your ESPHome device. This is needed if you have multiple esphome devices exposing sensors/entities with the same name.

This is a rant/followup to https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/18odja0/mqtt_not_assigning_unique_ids_i_thought_it_used/ which seems to have been archived for some reason.

I recently found out that home assistant prefixes entity names with device names for the entity id, and you can set a friendlyName. So it seemed the cleanest way to expose say multiple temperature sensors in multiple rooms, is to call them all name: temperature and set the friendlyName of each of the esp controllers according to the room of the house so the entity names end up like hall_temperature and bedroom_temperature. Previously I had esp32_bedroom_temperature and was dealing with it, or trying to use customize.yaml to fix it at hass.

However this leads to the dreaded "Platform mqtt does not generate unique IDs." error from hass. This commonly happens if you rename your ESP32 controller ( which I guess I had, so it seemed legit) and 99% of the posts above recommend different versions of clearing your data -> deleting the device on hass, deleting the retained messages, etc. I even went as far as nuking my mqtt container and trying to start again.. but it didnt help.

Turns out that while hass tries to be smart with entity id and keeping it unique with <device\_name>-<entity\_name>, it uses uniq_id provided by esphome to ensure it is a new entity, and this id is not using device name or any thing like that to keep it unique. In my case, both hall_temperature and bedroom_temperature were using ID ESPsensortemperature which was causing the clash.

I came across the reditt post above, but it didnt seem promising at the time, so didnt go deeper at first, and spent days trying other solutions. Setting that config solved my problem instantly. I dont know why this is not the default, instead of "legacy". I want to share this to spare others the pain.

Like the OP in the linked post.. this feels like I am still missing something, and cant be the intended experience.. let me know if I am missing something obvious, other than just naming your sensor verbosely with the device name at the source.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/tiberiusgv on 2026-02-16 23:19:06+00:00.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/Successful-Peak-6524 on 2026-02-16 19:47:23+00:00.

Got 2 in the email today and apart from detecting vibration on windows for an alarm system, I don't know what else to do with them.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/BenGmuN on 2026-02-16 17:11:06+00:00.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/graffitiwriter on 2026-02-16 12:34:03+00:00.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/rodeo90 on 2026-02-16 13:52:23+00:00.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/Puzzleheaded_Mind576 on 2026-02-16 04:41:08+00:00.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/wivaca2 on 2026-02-15 11:28:32+00:00.

In reading a recent CNN story (https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/10/tech/google-video-nancy-guthrie) on the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie, mother of NBC's Savannah Guthrie, I the following comment got my attention even though I don't own a Nest camera:

...Guthrie “had no subscription” to Google’s video recording service, which keeps videos from Nest cameras accessible in Google’s cloud.

But Nest still saves around three hours of “event-based” video history for free before being deleted. That data lives in Google’s cloud and servers.

So do you knowingly, and mandatorily get 3 hours of free video backup and registration of the camera is unavoidable, or is this something they are doing when owners might think there is no video data leaving the premises?

In this case, it sounds like Google went into their data storage and recovered deleted video for the investigation.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/Impressive-Hornet-91 on 2026-02-15 22:24:27+00:00.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/the012345 on 2026-02-15 21:29:05+00:00.

After a bit of trial and error, I finally have the "Holy Grail" of doorbell automations working: a low-latency WebRTC pop-up window on my Nvidia Shield that triggers automatically when the doorbell is pressed—without interrupting my movies!

I decided to use the ha-pipup HACS integration because it allows for a much cleaner service call in the UI.

The Stack:

• Nvidia Shield (running the PiPup APK)
• ha-pipup (HACS Integration)
• go2rtc (for the WebRTC stream)
• Hikvision Camera

The Shield's browser can be picky about Hikvision audio codecs. I created a dedicated silent sub-stream in go2rtc.yaml to ensure the PiP window never tries to play sound (which would pause your movie!).

cameraname: 
    - exec:ffmpeg -rtsp_transport tcp -i rtsp://user:password@xxx.xxx.x.xx:554/Streaming/channels/101 -an -c:v copy -f rtsp {output}

I have a ring intercom, which as soon as the bell is rung triggers a script which brings up the picture in picture screen then disapears after 30 secs

action: ha_pipup.pipup
data:
  entity_id: media_player.android
  media_width: 640
  media_height: 480
  media_web: http://xxx.xxx.x.xxx:1984/stream.html?src=front_door_pip
  duration: 30
  position: "2"

https://preview.redd.it/saycabt38qjg1.jpg?width=8160&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9ae895b69dc7278099c870ac518382898937a8d5