Home Assistant

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/seriousthrillissues on 2026-03-21 17:53:54+00:00.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/rapax on 2026-03-21 14:19:28+00:00.

We have a nice little pond in our backyard, with newts and toads and all kinds of local wildlife. In summer, it's the jewel of our back yard. Unfortunately, evaporation often leads to low water levels, so we have to occasionally top it up.

I have a nice setup with a zigbee water valve that I can open and close through HA, no problem. What I don't have is a reliable water level sensor. That is obviously something that needs fixing, so I got to thinking about ways of measuring the water level (boundary condition: the sensor must not be visible to comply with WAF criteria).

• Floaters don't work, too many plants and algae etc.
• Ultrasonic needs a minimum distance of 10-20cm and while there is little wooden bridge over the pond, it's only about 10cm from the water, so not enough room to mount a sensor

So I came up with the idea of hiding a little wifi camera under the bridge and mounting a broken piece of a yard stick in front of it. Then use AI vision to read the water level. Worked beautifully at first: a little automation to wake up the camera every three hours, turn on the LED floodlight, snap a picture, pass it to Gemini, get back the water level, turn on the water if it's too low. Beautiful.

That is, until our helpful little spiders decided that what that setup really needed was a bunch of cobwebs right in front of the lens, so that they could reflect the light everywhere and make reading the water level impossible.

Ok, it's their home, I'll find another way.

Let's revisit that idea with the ultrasound sensor. Yes, there's no enough room to mount it vertically under the bridge, but what about horizontally? I added a 45° reflector panel under the middle of the panel, and placed a Shelly BLU distance sensor on a flat rock under the end of the bridge. I intentionally didn't mount the sensor to the bridge, because I wanted to be able to just reach under there and grab it, whenever the battery needs charging. Brilliant. Works perfectly well...for a few days.

It's now early spring, and the frogs are having a party. There's more frogspawn in the pond every morning and at night, they're loudly enjoying themselves. Cool. Suddenly, the vibration sensor of the Shelly triggers, then again, and the distance becomes implausible. Then signal is lost.

Turns out, that the Shelly is IP64 rated, but that doesn't mean it likes being kicked into the pond by horny frogs. So now the sensor is dead. 2:0 for the critters.

I have now ordered one of these zigbee sensors. Apparently they have a shorter minimal distance, and are mains powered, so no battery needed. I wonder what which little beastie will foil my plans this time.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/hometechgeek on 2026-03-21 10:48:42+00:00.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/ScientistEasy1328 on 2026-03-21 08:19:28+00:00.

Running HA on a Raspberry Pi, CasaOS + Docker. Started looking at connecting Claude to the whole thing there’s the official MCP integration (added in 2025.2) and the community ha-mcp project. Haven’t set up either yet.

Question for people who’ve actually done this: does it change how you use HA day-to-day, or is it mostly a demo? And practically official integration or ha-mcp? I’m self-hosted without Nabu Casa, so remote access runs through my own tunnel. Curious if that breaks anything or if

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/trevah1200 on 2026-03-21 01:07:56+00:00.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/mattchew0 on 2026-03-21 00:40:40+00:00.

Is there an integration for Home Assistant you wish existed but haven’t been able to find? Maybe it’s a self hosted service or a product you wish had an integration.

Looking for my next project.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/i_bri on 2026-03-20 22:47:09+00:00.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/Forward-Arm3051 on 2026-03-20 20:51:01+00:00.

Original Title: Entity Manager update v2.17.0 A powerful, feature-rich Home Assistant integration for managing entities across all your integrations. View, enable, disable, rename, analyze, and bulk-manage entities and firmware updates from a single modern interface.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/hometechgeek on 2026-03-20 19:54:56+00:00.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/angrycatmeowmeow on 2026-03-20 15:31:04+00:00.

Original Title: If you enable "live notifications for all apps" in android developer settings, you can get HA live notifications as a chip in your status bar and in the Now Bar. It unfortunately doesn't work if you have an image in the notification.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/Flameknight on 2026-03-20 15:25:07+00:00.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/missyquarry on 2026-03-19 18:32:03+00:00.

For the March newsletter, we highlight why while Big Tech bets on AI, we’re investing in humans. 🤝 

Click the link to learn about how real people are our strength, the new community team, and more...

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/Team-Claratech on 2026-03-19 17:30:26+00:00.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/UmmUhhhShit on 2026-03-19 15:16:00+00:00.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/ArnyminerZ on 2026-03-18 09:53:16+00:00.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/Formal-Structure-432 on 2026-03-18 09:42:24+00:00.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/Gamester17 on 2026-03-17 21:41:49+00:00.

New open source ESP32-based replacement circuit board as drop-in for the original Google Home Mini (Gen1) smart speaker is in pre-launch for upcoming crowdfunding campaign. Based on an it will be more or less have feature parity with Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition hardware as that firmware is used as base:

https://www.crowdsupply.com/micimike-rev-devices/micimike-home-mini-drop-in-pcb

Inspired by the similar Onju Voice project but with same advanced XMOS DSP chip as Home Assistent Voice Preview Edition hardware, this new PCB design will be much more expensive to make but makes for very cool showpiece and talking point when can reuse the old hardware with its original aesthetic as a local voice assistant satellite for Home Assistant as well as Sendspin audio player via Music Assistent.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/ApolloAutomation on 2026-03-17 18:53:46+00:00.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/anthony-hines on 2026-03-17 15:35:04+00:00.

A while back I set up automations to monitor Zigbee link quality across all my devices. I was tracking LQI and availability state changes so I could spot devices with poor signal or ones dropping off the mesh. Across 169 Zigbee devices it generated a lot of state change events but the system handled it fine under normal conditions and I didn't think much of it.

Then something unrelated forced me to hard reboot the host. At the time I was running Zigbee2MQTT as an add-on inside HA, which means Z2M shares HA's lifecycle. When the host came back up, everything restarted at once. All 169 Zigbee devices began reconnecting to the mesh in waves, each one transitioning from unavailable to available. Every reconnection fired my availability automations, and every automation was another event landing on HA's event bus while Core was still trying to stand up. HA couldn't keep pace. The UI was barely responsive, automations were queueing faster than they could execute, and the system felt like it was drowning.

So I did what felt logical and rebooted again. Same result. The same 169 devices had to rejoin the mesh on every restart. Each reboot wasn't a recovery attempt, it was a replay of the same overload.

What made this hard to diagnose in the moment was that it didn't look like a Zigbee problem. It looked like HA was just slow to start up. It took me longer than I'd like to admit to realise the load was coming from the mesh reconnection hitting the automations hitting the event bus, not from Core itself.

The short-term fix was disabling the availability automations and letting HA come up clean. I've since cut LQI monitoring back to a handful of critical devices rather than the whole mesh. The overhead isn't worth it when it becomes a liability at the exact moment you need the system to recover.

The longer-term fix was moving Z2M and Mosquitto out of HA and into their own LXC containers on Proxmox. Ironically this gets me back to roughly the same resilience model I had when I was running separate Hue bridges, the mesh has its own lifecycle independent of HA. If I need to reboot the HA host now, the mesh doesn't notice. Devices stay connected, Z2M keeps running, and when HA comes back it just picks up the current state over MQTT and the recovery is clean every time.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/degeneratedVirginApe on 2026-03-17 13:40:52+00:00.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/AnthonyUK on 2026-03-17 08:55:49+00:00.

I know it is very early days but I'm loving Sendspin.

I had a spare Raspi3b which I installed Sendspin on it following this guide - https://github.com/Tycho-MEC/SASS

It appeared straight away in music assistant and works flawlessly. I'm using the cheapest Sabrent USB audio device (at the time) and have to say the quality is fine. It play FLACs and higher bitrate audio without an issue.

I have also seen some ESP32-C3 that can work.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/Darkchamber292 on 2026-03-17 13:11:38+00:00.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/avz008 on 2026-03-17 10:16:05+00:00.

I’ve been exploring Home Assistant and I’m amazed by how much you can automate — lights, temperature, security, routines.

I’m curious what people are actually using it for in real life.

What’s the coolest or most useful automation you’ve set up with Home Assistant?

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/AgitatedAd5221 on 2026-03-17 08:21:34+00:00.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/veldtor92 on 2026-03-17 05:26:42+00:00.