Home Assistant22

After every Home Assistant restart my KNX thermostats fell to 'standby' and stopped heating. Here is the homeassistant-start automation — with the crucial 30-second delay and a choose block — that re-initialises every thermostat to the correct mode.

A reproducible Home Assistant automation: a KNX window contact switches that room's thermostat to building_protection (frost guard) when it opens and back to comfort when it closes — with a 5-second debounce that stops the false triggers most tutorials ignore.

A practical guide to the Home Assistant REST sensor: tap any JSON cloud API, pull out single fields with value_template, authenticate via header, set a polling interval and scale raw values — shown on a real manufacturer API, transferable to any device without a native integration.

Read every Huawei SUN2000 register straight into Home Assistant with the built-in modbus platform — no custom component that breaks on upgrade. A complete register-to-YAML map with the right data_type, scale, device_class and state_class for the Energy Dashboard.

The Huawei SUN2000 SDongle accepts only one Modbus-TCP connection. Instead of an add-on, I wrote a ~300-line asyncio caching proxy that polls the dongle once every 10s and serves the registers to Home Assistant, AC·THOR and evcc at the same time. Full MBAP parsing, register batching and an in-memory cache.

Reading the AC·THOR 9s over Modbus TCP works, but writing is blocked at the device. Here's how I switched control to the undocumented my-PV Cloud API as a Home Assistant shell_command, with tested parameters and the gotchas nobody mentions.

Why your KNX thermostat ignores the temperature you set in Home Assistant — the five HVAC preset modes, the snap-back that looks like a bug, and how I automate them.

I didn't want Home Assistant to be a slave to the JUNG alarm panel. So I inverted ownership: HA owns the alarm state and pushes it back onto the KNX bus.

I wired an AC·THOR 9s into Home Assistant to dump PV surplus into the hot-water tank — then the device refused every Modbus write. Here's the read-local, write-cloud fix.

My inverter cloud shows self-consumption and autarky as pretty graphs. Home Assistant gives you raw counters. Here's how I rebuilt those numbers as template sensors I own.

In this story, we’ll explore HACS (Home Assistant Community Store), why it’s a game-changer, and how to get started with it.

Home Assistant is a powerful open source platform for home automation. For hosting, the use of a Linux VM in Azure and Docker is a good option.

A Home Assistant automation that compares your two MPPT strings and warns you the moment one drifts — early warning for shading, a dead module or a loose MC4 connector, with a night-time false-alarm guard.

The HACS integrations I actually run in Home Assistant – Huawei Solar, Tapo cameras, button-card and more – plus the community must-haves worth knowing.

Install HACS in Home Assistant step by step: the Get HACS add-on (HAOS), the one-line installer (Container/Core), GitHub authorization, and common fixes.

My Huawei SDongle accepts exactly one Modbus connection — but Home Assistant, the AC·THOR and evcc all want the inverter's data. Here's the ~300-line asyncio cache server I wrote to feed all of them from a single quiet poll.

A caching Modbus proxy only solves reads. Here is the write-through path: pass FC6 register writes straight to the inverter on a short-lived connection, echo the response, return proper Modbus exceptions — so you can force-charge the battery or set power limits over a single shared connection.

A bare humidity number doesn't tell you when a cellar will condense. I added a cheap Tapo T310 to my H100 hub and turned it into a dew-point mold early-warning.

Building a security dashboard in public: simulated sensors, a debounced trigger, dual logging, and the one decision that mattered most — what NOT to show.

Making KNX motion sensors drive lights that feel like the room is paying attention — the real trick is one extra group address, not a cleverer trigger.

A failure-mode playbook for a self-built Modbus cache proxy in Home Assistant: reconnect with backoff, stale-cache detection that HA can alert on, per-batch and client timeouts, and 50 ms spacing for a slow SDongle — so the proxy never silently serves zeros after a nightly drop or firmware reboot.

I let a 40-line Python script reshuffle my whole home-automation config — but only because a second script proved it didn't lose a single automation along the way.