My dad has worked on a farm in Iowa his whole life, and his fingerprints have gotten so worn down that the lock barely recognizes them anymore. With our old fingerprint lock, it felt like he'd have to try ten times just to get it to work once. Eventually, he just stopped using it and would wait for one of us to come home and let him in.

So now I'm looking to replace it with another smart lock. I'm currently considering the lockin veno go. It uses palm vein recognition, and there's also a PIN and a mechanical key as backup, which seems like it could be a better fit for him. He's also not really comfortable with facial recognition and doesn't like the idea of using his face to unlock the door.

I'm mostly trying to figure out which type of lock is actually the least frustrating for an older person. For those of you who've gotten smart locks for your parents, what problems or unexpected issues did you run into?

What were the biggest pain points? What would have been helpful to know when you were starting your home automation journey?

I'm currently looking at Nest thermostats, but the fourth generation is about $200.

Quite a few recommendations for Honeywell T6

Are there other options that would allow me to control temperature and automations through HAOS and via a dashboard I create?

Just got a smart toilet off wayfair (canada) and installed, I can’t seem to figure out how to turn off the automatic lid open/close function.

I’ve checked the manual, nothing in the manual works, and have tried pressing and holding the button to ‘turn off’ the function. Still no luck…..

An automation that breaks loudly gets fixed. A light that doesn’t turn on, you notice that evening.

The ones that worry me are the silent kind. Say an automation turns on a fan when a humidity sensor goes above a threshold. If that sensor drops off the network, nothing errors. The automation just never triggers again, and everything looks fine until the day you’d have needed it.

The cheapest guard I know of is a separate automation that only watches for the sensor going unavailable:

automation:
  - alias: "Sensor unavailable for a while"
    trigger:
      - platform: state
        entity_id: sensor.bathroom_humidity
        to: "unavailable"
        for: "00:30:00"
    action:
      - service: notify.mobile_app_my_phone
        data:
          message: "Bathroom humidity sensor has been unavailable for 30 min"

A few notes on the choices:

• the for: delay avoids a notification every time a device reconnects briefly
• one watcher per important sensor is repetitive, so a group or a template that lists unavailable entities may scale better
• newer Home Assistant versions use a slightly different key layout (triggers: with - trigger: state), and the old one still works, so check what your version expects

What this doesn’t cover: a sensor that stays “available” but is stuck on a stale reading, which looks healthy and is wrong. That one is harder, and I haven’t found a clean general answer.

How do you handle it? Do you monitor sensor health separately from the automations that use them, or just accept that you’ll notice eventually?

I got my Mi Band 5 streaming live heart rate to my Mac over Bluetooth, and the most useful thing I learned for automation purposes is how limited that feed actually is. If you're thinking of using a cheap band as a trigger source, this part matters.

The band doesn't expose individual heartbeats. It reports an averaged BPM, with no RR-interval data over BLE. It also runs a roughly 15-20 second measurement session and then stops. Sending a STOP to restart it reliably kills the stream instead. I ran eight different tests trying to push the sample rate. The realistic ceiling is about one reading every few seconds, sometimes not even one per second. If you need beat-level data, that's chest strap territory, like a Polar H10.

Getting there took some work. You need the band's 16-byte auth key, which I pulled from my own Zepp account with huami-token, and then an AES challenge-response. Then the "continuous" heart rate command was accepted but never turned on the optical LEDs, so I got 50 seconds of 0 bpm. On this firmware, the manual measurement command is what actually fires the sensor.

Architecture tip: BLE allows only one connection, so I have a single band service that owns it and writes readings into SQLite. Everything else, including a Streamlit dashboard, just reads the DB.

The fun part is my Wiz bulb. It maps BPM to color, green when I'm calm and red when my heart is racing. To hide the slow updates, it eases toward each new color at 12fps. It also auto-scales to my recent range, because otherwise a resting 83-109 bpm all looked like the same yellow-green.

The band can also take alerts back over the standard Alert Notification Service, so anything with an API can buzz my wrist.

I've tried everything, and none of the devices or apps want to work together.

HUE doesn't see IKEA stuff.

SmartThings only sees HUE bridge, but can't access it.

I have no idea how to connect them. They all support Matter, which is why I bought it all. And because the IKEA DIRIGERA hub has been unavailable in my county for... well forever.

Please help, I'm so close to just binning the HUE and keep using the IKEA lights with the IKEA buttons, no hub or anything.

Turns out my Wiz bulbs don't need the app or any encrypted API. I ran a network sniffer and after a few minutes found they just listen for plain JSON on UDP port 38899. Sending this sets a bulb to red:

{"method": "setPilot", "params": {"r": 255, "g": 0, "b": 0}}

Aleksandr Rogozin's blog post on hacking Wiz lights from the command line gave me a quick head start.

From there the weekend got away from me:

• A Python class to discover the bulbs and send on/off/color commands, wrapped in a FastAPI server with a basic HTML page for control from the browser.
• An audio visualizer that runs an FFT on mic input in real time. Bass (20-250Hz) drives red, mids (250-4000Hz) green, treble (4000-20000Hz) blue. I also added a pulse mode (warm white, brightness follows amplitude), a strobe mode for beats, and a multi mode where each bulb takes one frequency band.
• A DIY Ambilight using OpenCV that reads an mp4 frame by frame. One mode uses K-means to pick the dominant color of the whole frame. Another samples only the border pixels, like a real Ambilight. A hybrid mode takes color from the video and brightness from its audio track. I measured around 93ms latency.
• A stock indicator using the Groww Trading API. Green-ish if the price is above the day's open, red-ish if below, with brightness scaled to the size of the move. There's also a replay script that runs a historical trading day at 20x speed.

The UDP protocol was the easy part. The real problem was scope creep. What started as a custom light switch at the start of the weekend had me still going at 11PM with the video stuff.

The code for everything, from the basic API to the stock ticker, is on GitHub under myselfshravan/wiz-hack.

So looking for an alternative to the smart displays like the nest hub, Amazon echo show, etc that I can use with 4 goals.

All one box with speaker, display, and some kind of computer

Able to use it to control Home Assistant

Able to play video from Plex/YouTube

Voice features would be a great addition but not a requirement.

Been looking at trying to build something with a radxa rock, a pi 4/5, or other sbc with a 7-10 inch touch display, power supply, and speakers. But don't have the best mind for cad drawings in 3d prints to get it accomplished and just worried that it will work. So trying to see if anyone may have a similar setup or found a good alternative

I know there is a lot of discussion regarding building DIY version of the Skylight calendars… but I need some input and to toss around ideas.

My wife has been asking for a Skylight for at least a year now and I keep telling her I will try to DIY a solution instead of forking out the money for one 😁

It needs to be touchscreen so it’s easy for the whole family to use instead of just a display. But the real roadblocks are:
1) she would like it to be larger… like 27-32”!
2) We homeschool so she basically wants it to act as a digital whiteboard also. Thinking like second monitor or “cast” her iPad to it or something of the sorts.

Has anyone had any luck with those IR touch frames? That would definitely be a cheaper option than the $1k touchscreen monitors I am seeing at that size. Any other thoughts? I am not afraid of adb sideloading, “jailbreaks”, and any other tinking.

My dear fellow home automators,

The home automation space is progressing fast, and I find it hard to keep up with all the latest gadgets and standards. I am hoping you can share some guidance for my next project.

My only experience so far is with KNX and Home Assistant. I know about Zigbee, Z-Wave, Matter, etc. but have no practical experience with it.

For context: my current KNX-heavy setup, and why I hate it

In my current place I am quite deep in the KNX ecosystem: room controllers, climate systems, lights and blinds with centralized actuators, the whole shebang.

I run Home Assistant (on a HA Green) on top of it, which is nice for fine-grained control and fancy dashboards. If HA is down, the underlying crude KNX setup continues working. And because of HA, I started introducing some non-KNX stuff into the overall setup.

I have slowly developed a deep hate for KNX though.

• Every little thing in KNX is so ridiculously expensive. I am jealous of the prices of non-KNX smart hardware.
• I dread booting up ETS, knowing a trivial task will probably become another frustrating time sink. The module firmware ecosystem feels incredibly dated and limited.
• Sure, KNX is distributed... if you design it properly. I still run everything on a single KNX bus, because it's too time-intensive and expensive to run multiple. If the bus power fails or it gets flooded by a rogue sensor, all the wall switches still stop working. Who am I fooling.

What I would love my next setup to look like

I am likely moving houses within a year or so, and want to take my learnings from my current setup to improve the next one.

So given what I love and hate about my KNX setup, for my next project I would like to:

• Not get locked in again in a single ecosystem — especially a proprietary one
• Continue using HA for fine-grained control, but ensure basic house functions work without it
• Ensure it is easily configurable without requiring apps, hubs, extensive programming, etc. — I suppose web interfaces are the way to go
• Remove the 'single KNX bus' SPOF that I have today, and be careful not to introduce any new SPOFs for the whole house
• Continue having centralized actuation for lights and blinds in the breaker board

I really, really like that last point. I am enjoying the ease of maintenance and extensibility of having centralized actuation.

For example, a month ago I added two wall sconces in my kitchen. Now my (KNX) kitchen light switch triggers three (KNX) actuators at once: the ceiling light and the two sconces. Without requiring HA to orchestrate anything.

The dumbest smart lighting I can think of

As I started designing my next setup from scratch, I (of course) want to start with lighting. With the above wishlist in mind, I am ending up thinking I should keep the setup as dumb as possible. So for each room, I would have:

dumb momentary switch -> (room-specific) smart actuator -> dumb lightbulb(s)

For example, I found the Shelly Pro 4PM actuator. It has a web interface and supports MQTT. If it fails, the blast radius is limited to only the lights in that one room. And, it can seemingly even take an analog input from an old school momentary switch to trigger one or more of its outputs.

Replacing the dumb wall switch with a (semi-)smart one would also work, of course, as long as its easy to configure and uses some open protocol. I cannot find any such switches, however. Most seem to come with a hub or an app, or force you to use some built-in actuator.

I'm finding it surprisingly hard to find any alternatives similar to this Shelly setup. It seems like in most cases I have to give up at least one of my design principles.

What do you guys think? Am I thinking in the right direction with my design principles? Is this Shelly setup I found truly unique within these principles, or am I missing some obvious (and possibly better) alternatives?

I'm hopeful to find some people on here that have more experience with this whole topic than I do. 😁

I’m trying to make my front door smart while keeping the existing Mul-T-Lock hardware/security if possible.
This is what the inside of the door looks like. The Mul-T-Lock has a pretty large thumbturn and is mounted on a metal reinforcement plate. There are also a couple of metal studs/nubs sticking out from the door near the lock, so I’m not sure if those would interfere with a retrofit smart lock.

I’ve been looking at the Aqara U200 and SwitchBot Lock Ultra. I’m leaning toward the U200 because I use Apple Home and really like the idea of Apple Home Key, but I’m not sure if it will physically fit over this setup.

Has anyone made a Mul-T-Lock setup like this smart without replacing the exterior cylinder?
Ideally I’d like to:
Keep the existing Mul-T-Lock and exterior key
Add Apple Home/Home Key if possible
Avoid drilling or permanently modifying the door
Still be able to manually unlock it normally
Use a retrofit lock on the inside
Would the U200 work here, or would the SwitchBot Lock Ultra/custom adapter be a better option? Also, are those metal studs near the lock likely to cause clearance issues?

Hello everyone,

I've been looking to buy a Smart door lock for my home, but I am unable to find any options with UWB in europe. It seems that you can make the U400 work, but that its not 100% supported. Even new releases like the LG doesn't seem to have any options in Europe. Is there no future releases that are not too far away, or should I assume that there wont be any releases or any available options any time soon?

Rainy season is starting here in the PNW, so I’ve been researching where small household leaks go unnoticed. A few setup details seem more important than buying a big bundle:

• Warning vs. shutoff: a sensor can warn you, but stopping the water needs a compatible valve and a tested setup.

• Local sound vs. phone alerts: check whether the exact model needs a hub or internet, and test notifications with your phone locked.

• Placement: put the sensing contacts where water is likely to collect, while keeping the unit accessible for testing and battery changes. One sensor doesn’t cover a whole room.

• Clear names: “Water under kitchen sink” is more useful than “Sensor 03.”

• Maintenance: follow the manufacturer’s test instructions and set a reminder to check batteries and alerts.

Beyond the water heater, washer and under sinks, what less-obvious spot has caught a leak for you? And was a local alarm enough, or did you need a remote alert?

Hi i saw the new TP-WGZBA and it looks amazing. I was wondering if it could run also cooling mode.

It would be usefull in some use case where i have a fancoil which can run in both heating or cooling mode without modifying its own thermostat. So for example i can use the dry contact with a contactor or i can power the fancoil directly from the thermostat as it is under 3A.

Thanks :)