// Blog
Real-world Home Assistant guides, hardware reviews, and automation blueprints. No fluff — just what works.
How I built a daily 06:00 spoken briefing in Home Assistant using Google AI TTS (Gemini), calendar.get_events across three family calendars, EV charge status, Waze commute traffic, live electricity price, and a garbage collection countdown.
My Home Assistant SQLite database hit 963 MB in six days. Here's the exact recorder config that cut daily growth by over 70% — with the full YAML and the reasoning behind each exclusion.
How I automated the radiator in Louise's room to turn off when the window opens and back on when it closes — built as a reusable Blueprint so the next room takes 30 seconds to add.
How I built a nightly CI pipeline that runs 22 tests against my live Home Assistant setup and automatically opens a GitHub issue when something breaks — before I notice it myself.
What the MyŠkoda integration actually gives you in Home Assistant, what's missing, and how I built a useful EV dashboard with a battery progress bar and calendar-triggered pre-conditioning.
How I wired a PricelessToolkit MailBoxGuard to an AliExpress LoRa gateway, got instant push notifications when mail arrives, and haven't touched the battery in over a year.
Unifying a Sonos speaker with four Google Nest Audio speakers via Home Assistant scripts — no third-party bridges, no subscription.
How I built a circadian lighting system using WiZ bulbs and the HA sun entity — no third-party integration, just a single automation that maps solar elevation to colour temperature every 30 minutes.
How I stopped manually adjusting the outdoor light timer twice a year — a simple HA automation that turns on Govee and LEDVANCE string lights at sunset and off at midnight, every season.
How I automated the living room lights to dim when a movie starts, brighten on pause, and restore fully when the TV turns off — no scene button, no voice command.
One automation that pauses the TV the moment either phone rings — regular mobile calls resume automatically, Messenger video calls get an actionable notification button.
How I got a Reolink CX810 4K PoE camera to read license plates with AI and push a snapshot straight to the TV when someone pulls into the driveway.
How I connected the Bosch dishwasher via Home Connect, built a dashboard with programme selection and finish-time control, and added a button that finds the cheapest hour to run it.
How I combined four Google Calendars plus waste collection into a single colour-coded HA view that replaced the wall calendar we'd had for years.
How I built an HA home screen where every card earns its place: conditional cards that appear only when something is active, a priority alert ticker, and a Škoda section that changes based on whether the charger is connected.
Using Energi Data Service in Home Assistant to track hourly spot prices, find the cheapest charging window, and automate Škoda Elroq charging without touching the app.
Setting up the Roborock S5 Max in Home Assistant with an interactive map card, room-segment cleaning, and the maintenance tracking that will eventually save you from a burnt-out brush.
How I set up 5 Tado zones in Home Assistant with mushroom climate cards, a CSS breathing animation for active heating, and presence-based setback that actually works.
How I got the Sentinel camera to send useful, actionable alerts instead of 40 motion pings a day — one automation, a mute toggle, and action buttons.
Mammotion Flora (Luba Mini 2) in Home Assistant: GPS boundary mowing, weather-aware scheduling, and the satellite count quirk nobody warns you about.
The six CSS constants I use across every card on three Home Assistant dashboards, plus the patterns for progress bars, map cards, and suppressing the Frosted Glass Dark theme's ::before overlay.
Moving Home Assistant from Raspberry Pi 4 to a Dell OptiPlex 7060 on Proxmox VE — VM sizing, USB passthrough, and why snapshots changed how I handle updates.