I'm a truck accessory installer and solar tech, and I kept hitting the same wall with friends: they'd hear about Home Assistant, get excited, install it, then bounce off the YAML and the automation editor within a week. The gap between "normal person" and "HA power user" is huge, and it shouldn't be.

So I built HouseAssist. You connect your HA instance once, then just describe what you want — typed or by voice:

• "Turn my garage lights on when I get home after sunset"
• "Build me a dashboard for my solar setup"
• "Notify me if the sump pump sensor goes offline"

It reads your actual entities from your instance, so it uses your real device names instead of guessing placeholders. Automations deploy directly to your HA and are live immediately. Dashboards come back as ready-to-paste YAML with instructions. There's a hands-free voice mode where it talks back and keeps listening, which is handy when you're on a ladder holding a motion sensor.

What you need: a Home Assistant instance reachable from the internet (Nabu Casa remote URL, DuckDNS, reverse proxy — whatever you've got) and a long-lived access token.

What it costs: nothing right now. It's a free beta while I find the rough edges. Eventually it'll be a cheap subscription, and beta testers will get a locked-in founder's rate if they want to stay.

On security, since you'll ask: your HA token is encrypted at rest, sign-up is just email and password, no data selling, no ads.

It's at houseassist.app.

I built this solo over a holiday weekend (with one hand in a bandage, but that's another story), so there will be bugs. That's why I'm here — tell me what breaks, what's confusing, and what's missing. Blunt feedback preferred.

I have just started a brand new home assistant setup after my old HA failed (Iv done another post about this)

One of the things I’d like to achieve this time that I never did on my old setup is to set up a security system.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated especially when it comes to hardware, mainly I’d love to have an alarm pad with a keypad to put a PIN number in to disable the alarm and an arm button…. (Ideally I’d like 2 alarm pads one at the front door and one at the back door)

I have some aqara PIR sensors on zigbee and some RF window/door sensors that do open/closed sensing etc but I’m not against replacing these if there is a better solution

I am looking at replacing some if not all the PIR sensors with mmWave sensors in the future for increased presence sensing especially in areas where low movement causes false results such as in the toilet if someone is sat to long, in the bedroom or living room if someone is sat watching tv.

All help and advice or hardware recommendations welcome.

Many Thanks

So, just finished getting everything setup with my HA via a Sonoff Dongle-P (zigbee mqtt).

Sensors work great but I was wondering how often - other than low battery and leak detection - do they send info back to the controller/HA? Reason is, I would love to have an automation that checks at some frequency (daily?) to make sure that all of the sensors are online and working and then send me an alert when there is a problem.

TIA!