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Dashboards Apr 29, 2026

A Wall-Mounted Tablet Dashboard for Home Assistant: Layouts, Touch Targets, and What I Got Wrong Twice

How I built a Lovelace dashboard for a wall-mounted tablet that family members actually use, plus the mobile and desktop variants. Sizing, view organization, and the audit pass that fixed 22 broken cards.

Infrastructure Apr 22, 2026

My Home Assistant Backup Strategy After 18 Months Running 50+ Devices

Daily snapshots, weekly off-host pulls, monthly cold copies. The exact retention policy I run, what I learned from one near-miss restore, and what's still on the to-do list.

Automation Apr 15, 2026

From Node-RED to Native HA YAML: A Real Migration Postmortem

I ran most of my Home Assistant logic in Node-RED for two years. In early 2026 I migrated everything to native YAML automations. Here's what triggered the move, what was harder than expected, and what I'd do differently.

Esp32 Apr 8, 2026

Five ESP32 Devices I Built for My Smart Home (And Which I'd Build Differently)

RATGDO garage controller, gate alarm, electric-fence monitor, vacuum-water-relay, and a battery-management board for a 12V dashcam install. What worked, what I'd change, and the ESPHome configs that drive them.

Security Apr 1, 2026

Layered Home Security in Home Assistant: Contacts, Locks, Gates, and Alarmo

How I combine a RATGDO garage controller, ESP32 gate alarm, two Z-Wave deadbolts, contact sensors, leak shutoff, and Alarmo into a coherent security setup that sends one notification per event instead of six.

Security Mar 25, 2026

Z-Wave Lock Code Management in Home Assistant: Why I'd Skip Keymaster Now

I run two Z-Wave deadbolts with Keymaster, slot-aware unlock notifications, and date-restricted PIN codes. After a year and the 2025.8 breakage, I'd recommend Lock Code Manager instead. Here's the comparison and the YAML.

Automation Mar 18, 2026

Auto-Pulling BlackVue Dashcam Footage With Home Assistant and Docker

How I get BlackVue DR970X and DR900X dashcam footage off the cameras and onto my NAS automatically every time the cars come home — using BlackVueSync, ping sensors, and a small HA package.

Automation Mar 11, 2026

Presence Detection at 326 Lines: What Finally Worked After Three Rewrites

Why my first two attempts at home-versus-away detection in Home Assistant kept misfiring, what the working version actually does, and the failure modes that took the longest to track down.

Energy Monitoring Mar 4, 2026

Tesla Solar in Home Assistant Without the Cloud (Mostly)

Pulling instantaneous production, daily / monthly / yearly totals, and useful alerts out of two Tesla PVI-45 inverters into Home Assistant — what works locally, what doesn't, and the YAML I actually run.

Energy Monitoring Feb 25, 2026

Getting a Span Gen3 Panel Working in Home Assistant (And Getting the Patch Merged Upstream)

How I added local gRPC support for Span MAIN 40 / MLO 48 panels to the community span_panel integration after Span dropped the documented REST API in Gen3 hardware.