// home assistant · zigbee · esphome
mastalavista smarthome
Honest guides from a real, working smart home — Home Assistant, Zigbee, PV, and everything that broke along the way.
All guides
- 09/17/2026Cat Alert: Home Assistant Announces an Open DoorBoth cats walked out the open front door. Why the Ring base station could not help, and what an Echo Spot, a tablet, a TV and a timer do instead.→
- 09/16/2026Shutter Safety Interlock for a Catio in Home AssistantThe 20:00 schedule locked Alfie and Shaniqua out in the catio. How a Home Assistant safeguard reverses any close on a SOMFY shutter while the door is open.→
- 09/15/2026Local Speech-to-Text for Home Assistant: Whisper over LLMA local audio LLM was flawless on test files and useless on a real microphone. The route to local STT for Assist over Wyoming with faster-whisper.→
- 08/24/2026Gardena Micro-Drip in Home Assistant: What It Really DoesDrip irrigation against the 2026 drought — and the sobering discovery that the Gardena integration in Home Assistant is a remote control, not a schedule.→
- 08/22/2026Energy Monitoring in Home Assistant: Local API, not CloudWhy cloud devices leave holes in the Energy Dashboard, and how I pull my NEOOM system into Home Assistant over its local API instead.→
- 08/20/2026Terrace Misting with a Zigbee Valve in Home AssistantA cheap misting line turned into an automated terrace cooler: SONOFF Zigbee water valve, a sun-and-heat trigger, and the failsafe that stops it flooding the patio.→
- 08/17/2026Tesla Fleet API in Home Assistant: HTTPS Host, Keys, nginxAll I wanted was charging control — and ended up running a public HTTPS host with Let's Encrypt and a PEM under .well-known. The nginx config and the traps.→
- 08/14/2026Charging a Tesla from PV Surplus: NEOOM + HysteresisMy cron job stopped charging when it had no business doing so. Why a string comparison was to blame, and what the stable Home Assistant automation looks like.→
- 08/11/2026Garage Gate in Home Assistant: Tapping the Remote via GPIOMonths of reverse-engineering a Belfox 868 MHz remote — and what worked was an optocoupler across the button. Three gates in Home Assistant, honestly told.→
- 08/08/2026SOMFY Shutters in Home Assistant: Rolling Code ExplainedRolling code can't be cloned. My verdict after months of tinkering: the official bridge, FHEM with a CUL on 433.42 MHz — and what you can safely skip.→
- 08/05/2026Zigbee Coordinator over the Network: Sonoff + ser2netMoving a Sonoff Zigbee dongle onto a Pi and connecting Home Assistant over TCP with ser2net — the mistakes that cost me weeks, and when to skip it.→
- 08/02/2026Zigbee Device Keeps Dropping Off: an Honest Case StudyOne Zigbee valve in a garden pit, no routers, coordinator in the basement — why it kept dropping, what the USB extension did, and what actually fixed it.→