u/LESGuy

I’m using a Seeed reSpeaker Lite 2-Mic Array Voice Kit, a 2” full range driver (4ohms 5 watt), and a 2 pin JST-PH pigtail.

I already have Gemma running on ollama on a dedicated 3090 box.

What you heard in the video was just using HA’s cloud but this afternoon I’ll be installing Piper and Whisper for local control of my house.

Pretty excited and wanted to share. One step closer to getting away from Siri and HomePods.

I posted a couple weeks ago about all the nerdy smart home things I was doing and got a great response. Lots of people said they would love to get together and geek out over this stuff.

So this Thursday I’ll be at Bentonville Brewing having a beer and if anyone wants to stop by and talk about how the lights come on when you walk in a room, daily “morning reports” automatically playing when you start brushing your teeth in the morning, how to save money on monthly bills from smart automations, anything at all, come stop by!

To find me, look for the guy wearing a dark blue “best dog dad” t shirt with a picture of a Samoyed on it :)

I was looking at my tablet dashboard and noticed that I was using power in the theater room. This room is upstairs and we haven’t been up there in a few days so that was very odd.

I went up there and sure enough, my AppleTV was on which then woke my denon receiver as well as my tv.

I asked Claude to take a look at the logs and it said that there was no indication that HA initiated this and it was a “self wake” event. It then notified me that my bedroom AppleTV was also on. They both came on right around 8:14am.

Has anyone else had this happen before? Any weird apple fuckery going on this morning? Maybe an update?

ETA: I just looked at my software update page and it says “26.6, Last check: Sept 9, 2026”. Definitely not caused by an update

It’s funny how interested they were in her but then she was like “Nah, not interested, let’s go!”

I’ve been doing a ton of work around the house as just a hobby messing with Home Assistant smart home things. Using a bunch of smart devices (bulbs, switches, motion/mmWave presence sensors, security cams, wall mounted devices, etc etc) to automate my life as well as using a bunch of ESP32 devices to integrate non smart things (sprinklers, garage door, tankless water system, automatic blinds, etc) into the smart home system.

My problem: I don’t have anyone to chat with about all these super cool (not nerdy) things I’m doing. My gf does her best to be supportive but I can tell she is extremely not interested in my Logic Analyzer wave patterns… I have no idea why…

Any other local folks into this? Maybe we call all meet up and share ideas or stories or just say “whoah, that’s cool!” to each other.

Side fact of the day: if you are on iPhone and hold down the space bar when you’re typing you can easily move the cursor wherever you want. Way easier than trying to tap the exact location you want to edit something with your finger

Maybe not for everyone but I think this style is absolutely gorgeous. I really wish they would up their game in the US. I would even pay extra to get this one but I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t fit my crappy freedom doors.

Anyone actually have one of these? If so, thoughts?

I will seal them a bit but I’m not too too worried about sealing them since this is above my garage and I don’t have anything in there that doesn’t like heat (no fridges or split units in there).

I’m more worried about insulation and dust getting into the back.

What are some budget options or do people even worry about closing this up? I would assume it’s good to do so…

Full transparency, I needed a lot of help from Claude code to get the yaml working in esphome, but I learned a ton along the way. This has been a really fun little side project. I’ll eventually get an enclosure for it and put it somewhere yet to be determined, but wanted to share what I had so far!

Some folks asked for an update to my garage auto open/close project that I was doing with a bluetooth beacon and ratgdo so here it is.

After about a week of testing and dialing everything in I can now with 100% success rate have my garage open when we are on the way home and close after we leave without us having to do anything.

What I used to make this happen:

ratgdo (Rage Against The Garage Door Opener) - I installed this esp32 based piece of hardware in-line with my garage door opener.  I bought it from ratcloud llc and it was extremely straight forward for my Security 2.0 Chamberlain door opener.

After I had that integrated into both Home Assistant and HomeKit I was able to open, stop, and close it in Home Assistant as well as use voice commands with Siri to open/close the garage door.  I was also able to say "Hey Siri, is my garage door open?" and if she said yes, I could close it from either my phone or from CarPlay via voice.

Now that those functions were solid I decided to dive into making it automatically open when we are on our way home and close after we leave.

I first tried to use zones.  I set a small zone around our house and an automation saying "when we leave that zone, close the garage door" and I also set a larger zone around my neighborhood saying "when we enter this zone, open the garage door".  I had intermittent success with this and had to play with the zone sizes a lot since there can be a bit of lag when leaving and coming before the automation kicks in.  I also had some instances where it never kicked in, just leaving the garage door open completely.

During all of my testing, I was watching the garage door through my cameras to see what was happening and to manually close things if it didn't act correctly.

Since this was hit or miss I decided to add another layer (not replace the zone, but add to the zone automations) of doing a BLE ESP32 proxy with a beacon in her car.

This took some dialing in and some tweaking before I was able to get it setup perfectly for our situation (tweaks included playing with the beacon transmit power and transmit interval as well as some esp config changes).

Now I have had 100% success rate with the two layer approach.  Sometimes the beacon automation will close the door, sometimes the zone automation will close the door, but the door always gets closed.  Same for coming home, it's interesting to see which automation hits first, but it's always open when we get near the driveway.

Other folks add another layer of having wifi connects and disconnects as part of this or even have cameras watching the garage with frigate automations but I haven't gotten to that level of need (yet).

I know it's just a simple button click to open or close the garage door, but it just feels like magic to do nothing and have the door open and close in a way that you want and that's what I love about home assistant.

Feel free to ask any questions and I'll do my best to answer.

Pictured:
Seeed ESP32 S3
2.4 GHZ external antenna
Blue Charm Beacon

I’m about 4 months into HA and have over 200 devices, 50 automations, and approximately 100 eye rolls when I show my gf the cool new thing I just did ha.

I have way more complicated automations than this one (this one is blinds down, fan on, ecobee changed to 70* and double click reverses it all). But knowing that Esp32 module I configured with a C1101 to make these Somfy blinds bend to my will (and the pain I experienced making it work) and the cool new inovelli blue fan switch I put in, just seeing it all work so smooth warms my heart.

Anyway, no one else I know appreciates it so here yall go.