this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2026
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Pretty sure my house wouldn't work anymore without it. My girlfriends growlights, the blinds, the vacuum, the lawn mower, hell even the kettle to some extent.
The kettle?!
Yes. It's not a kettle as in the pot you put on the stove, but an electric water ... heater ... thingy. I honestly have no idea how to call it in english. The german word would be "Heißwasserspender", literally translating to "hot water dispenser". I disassembled it, soldered a tiny raspberry pi board to it that could control the device as you could with the buttons and wrote a rudimentary API that I now control via home assistant.
Within HA, I can control the kettle via calling the API of the pi. For example, I got a script that triggers if my girlfriends phone is entering my WLAN-network.
The call to the API looks like this:
It's dynamic, so for the "default black tea" she likes, these are the arguments
And this is the trigger:
That call is received by the pi, who then triggers the kettle. So every time my girlfriends phone is entering the wifi, it's between 18:00 and 20:00 and there's a cup present (done via a simple proximity sensor that I glued to the side of the kettle. That's also not known to the home assistant, I didn't really know how to feedback that information to it so I just had it handled by the pi itself), the kettle triggers and dispenses hot water. She can also do it manually via the home assistant app, I made a widget for that where you can just select temperature, amount and that's it.
I just hope the thing never breaks because I reassembled it using superglue, but then I noticed I forgot to install SSH on the pi, making it kinda an isolated piece of software that I just hope keeps running indefinitely lol.