Home Automation

Hi, I’m Jack. Home automation is one of my favourite rabbit holes, and Home Assistant is at the centre of all of it. This page is a look at what I’ve built at home and why I think it’s worth doing.

What is home automation?

Home automation means getting all your smart devices working together, so the house looks after the boring stuff for you. Lights, heating, cameras and plugs can all be controlled from your phone, and better still, they can react to each other without you lifting a finger.

My setup

My home runs on Home Assistant, and these days it lives on a Home Assistant Yellow. I started out on a Raspberry Pi 5 with an NVMe drive and a PoE hat, which served me well, but the Yellow is purpose built for the job and everything lives in one tidy box.

Hanging off it are lights, plugs, sensors, cameras, speakers and the servers in my homelab. If you’re curious about the thinking behind it all, I’ve written up the rules my smart home lives by.

Zigbee, Matter and Hue

A Home Assistant Connect ZBT-2 is my Zigbee coordinator, looking after plugs, switches, door sensors, temperature sensors and leak sensors. Zigbee is still my favourite for sensors. It’s cheap, the batteries last for ages, and it all works locally without a cloud account.

The lights are a mix. Most are Philips Hue on their own Hue bridge, and the newer ones are added over Matter.

ESPHome

I’ve got a good handful of ESPHome devices, several of them my own builds, like the fish feeder, plant sensors and an RFID reader. A few Bluetooth proxies pick up Bluetooth gadgets anywhere in the house. They all update themselves overnight, which I’ve written up in hands-off ESPHome firmware updates.

Automations

I’ve built over 40 automations around how my family actually lives. They do everything from feeding the fish to switching the rack fans on, and a few of my favourites have their own write-ups:

• One alert for the whole homelab: a single notification listing every offline server or pending update
• Keeping my comms rack cool: fans, a UPS battery fan, NAS drive temperatures and leak sensors
• Hands-off ESPHome firmware updates: every ESP device updated overnight, one at a time
• A sarcastic AI doorbell: LLM Vision describes who’s at the door, with dry British humour
• RFID cards that start films: tap a card, the film plays from Plex

If I had to pick the one the family would miss most, it’s the RFID film cards. Choosing a film by picking up a card with the poster on it is so much simpler for children than scrolling through a streaming menu.

• The rules my smart home lives by: local first, quiet notifications and running it like production

The Companion app

We all have the Home Assistant Companion app on our phones. It’s how notifications reach us wherever we are, and it means the house can react to people rather than just to sensors.

CCTV

My CCTV cameras and doorbell are hooked into Home Assistant as well. When someone presses the doorbell, the downstairs lights flash and a speaker announces it, and a few seconds later an AI-written description of whoever’s there pops up on our phones. That last one is a story of its own.

Voice control

Voice works two ways in our house. My office has a Home Assistant Voice speaker, where speech recognition and the spoken replies run locally. Home Assistant handles everyday commands itself, and anything it doesn’t understand goes to Claude. Around the rest of the house we use Echo Dots, connected to Home Assistant through Home Assistant Cloud, so they control the same lights, heating and blinds.

What’s next

There’s always something new to try, and smarter energy management is one of them. If you’re thinking about getting started, my advice is to pick one annoying daily job and automate that first. Have a look at my projects for some of the things I’ve built.