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Home Automation

Since 2020

Home automation is one of my long-running hobbies. My home runs on Home Assistant: at the time of writing, more than 3,500 entities across some 200 physical devices, orchestrated by 180+ automations. More than 50 core integrations are configured, extended through HACS with close to 30 custom integrations and some 40 custom frontend cards, while about 25 apps (formerly add-ons) complete the setup. The fleet is a mix of technologies, with local AI object detection on the cameras and local voice control:

  • around 130 Zigbee devices
  • around 30 Wi-Fi and wired network devices
  • around 15 devices bridged over MQTT
  • a dozen Z-Wave devices
  • a handful of Bluetooth sensors

Over the years, tinkering has turned into contributing to the ecosystem, and the house naturally runs my own browser apps and my maintained fork of the Spotcast integration.

Home Assistant itself runs on a Home Assistant Blue, and the smart home is part of a larger self-hosted homelab virtualized with Proxmox VE on a GMKtec mini PC: a dozen Linux containers and virtual machines covering DNS-level ad blocking, media streaming and library automation, backups to a NAS, and secure remote access through a mesh VPN. A dedicated Docker host runs the companion services of the smart home, such as the network video recorder and MQTT bridges.

Beyond my own browser apps and Spotcast fork, I occasionally contribute fixes and documentation across the ecosystem, such as the Home Assistant Companion documentation.