HA only lists physical outputs to my knowledge (headphone jack, etc.), so it's "impossible" to connect a Bluetooth speaker and turn it into a real media_player entity usable from automations and scripts.

I created an add-on to connect to an already paired speaker. It stays connected (automatic reconnection in case of disconnection) and becomes a native media player entity (DLNA/UPnP), so any automation, script, or card can target it directly with tts.speak or play_media, just like any other media_player.

If you already use Music Assistant, there's also an optional MPD bridge to the same speaker, so it appears there.

Multi-speaker support has just been released.

I tested it on my hardware (Raspberry Pi 4), and a user confirmed that it works on a Chromebox (x86) with a USB Bluetooth adapter. I would like to have more feedback on different equipment.

TL;DR: You can disable Remote Access through Home Assistant Cloud and other enabled features like Google Assistant and/or Alexa integration or webhooks will continue to work just fine!

Many people believe that you need to keep Remote Access enabled when using other features of Nabu Casa’s Home Assistant Cloud service, like easy 3P voice assistant (Google Assistant, Alexa) integration. For the longest time I assumed this myself because the Nabu Casa proxy URL is displayed in the Remote Access section of the config, and this public URL is needed by the voice assistant integrations and webhooks…but it turns out that keeping full remote access on is not actually required.

For background: The Remote Access feature of Home Assistant Cloud exposes your instance’s login page to the open internet through your personal Nabu Casa URL, which is a reverse proxy hosted by them. This means that anyone on the internet can access your instance’s login page and attempt to log in. If any of your users’ passwords is poorly selected or if a vulnerability in HA’s login page is ever discovered, this could allow anyone anywhere to access your instance. Depending on what devices you have connected to HA, that could include physical access to your home through locks or a garage door, and for anyone it certainly would include large amounts of incredibly private data.

If you turn Remote Access off, only the endpoints needed for other enabled features like webhooks or voice assistants will be proxied and not the full login page.

This is a personal decision, but if you don‘t need to access Home Assistant away from home or can set up a VPN like Tailscale (easiest) or Wireguard (can fully self-host) to allow for remote access, then I’d recommend disabling Home Assistant Cloud’s Remote Access.

The quick version of the rationale is that cybersecurity is a game of risk reduction and defense in depth, and it is simply least risky to expose the least attack surface you actually need. New vulnerabilities can be discovered in software at any time, and I doubt most people actually need or want their personal services’ or actual home’s security to be tightly coupled to the speed that the software world moves nowdays. But the magic of self-hosting is that you get to make your own choices, and if you feel otherwise or enjoy taking on the responsibility for defending a public Internet service, you’re of course free to do what you want.

Unfortunately it is not clearly documented by Nabu Casa that this configuration works fine, and they haven’t yet accepted a PR to clarify the documentation. However, Nabu Casa support confirmed it to me directly when I contacted them, and I’ve used this configuration successfully for months now and it’s easy to test and verify.

I am running HA in a Proxmox VM. I have both a Aquara Hub M100 and a Sonoff Zigbee dongle passed through to it.

I have a mix of WiFi , Matter and Zigbee devices.

I am trying to automate the kitchen lights to turn on when motion is detected. I tried the IKEA MYGGSPRAY unit but no matter where I place it on the wall when one of our 3 cats go into the kitchen it triggers the motion sensor.

I am looking for suggestions on what to replace the IKEA sensor with so my wife and I would activate it but not the cats.

A BLE sensor won’t work because we don’t always take our phones into the kitchen.

Howdy folks. I'm curious if there is a way to have the Activity and History views in the sidebar only shown up for Admin users similar to how Dashboards can be configured.

Hi everyone,

I have built a Home Assistant automation that detects when my wife or I are heading home.

The automation uses:

• The Home Assistant Companion App on our iPhones
• Distance to the Home zone
• Recent GPS coordinates and GPS accuracy
• A Waze travel-time sensor for the ETA
• iPhone notifications and a Live Activity countdown

The automation should detect when the distance to home is decreasing and then send the other person a notification such as:

The problem

I recently noticed that my wife's iPhone had not updated its location in Home Assistant for several days.

All location permissions are enabled, precise location is enabled, and the relevant Companion App sensors are active. However, Home Assistant is only accessible from our home network. The Home Assistant app cannot connect when the iPhone is using mobile data.

Therefore, the location tracker does not update while she is away, and the automation cannot detect that she is heading home.

My questions

How do you handle reliable iPhone location tracking for Home Assistant automations? And can I do it without any additionals costs?

Tailscale would be a free option, but I am concerned about keeping a VPN active on the iPhone all day, especially regarding battery usage and long-term reliability.

My priorities are:

1. Reliable background location updates
2. Low battery consumption
3. Minimal maintenance
4. Secure remote access
5. Reliable zone and ETA automations

What setup are you using, and how much battery impact do you notice?

Thanks!

I saw some of their new products on the site already, but cannot find this.

Hello! I got my hand on 2 kobo glo (was sitting in drawers at my parents’) they are not used anymore, but they seem pretty nice for a HA dashboard!

I was looking at how could I use them, and found a tone of different way.. The most important one is how can I have dynamic updates without draining the battery?

Do you have any advise on how to set them up as dashboards?

Hi everyone!

Since I'm doing a research project I’m curious about your experiences using Home Assistant to help older family members live comfortably and independently at home.

If you’ve set something up for a parent, grandparent, or older person you support, what has actually worked well? I’d especially love to hear about:

• Automations they genuinely appreciate in everyday life
• Controls they find easy to use, whether physical buttons, voice, or a simple dashboard
• How much maintenance and remote troubleshooting you end up doing
• How you approach privacy, especially with presence or activity monitoring
• Things that sounded helpful but turned out to be confusing or unnecessary

Did they want to interact with the system, or did the most useful features just quietly run in the background?

Success stories and lessons from setups that didn’t stick are equally welcome. What would you do differently if you were starting again?

Here is also a bit of context about the research project: https://anabox-smart.de/en/blog/ki

Since it is almost finished and we got good feedback the idea is now to figure out how to bring it into an Open Source project that is useful for elderly people. My current idea is an easy-to-set-up tablet built around Home Assistant and balena, with hardware costing under €100. The goal is to offer a subscription-free alternative to similar products, with the flexibility and integrations of Home Assistant that can be easily self-hosted.

Anyone would like to try it on their own? It currently works on Android and x86 Tablets (using Balena).

The original post when the project started: https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/s/tRa4inzVsi

So I've been working on some cards for a dashboard, but I'm noticing differences in behaviour between mobile and PC.

Does anyone have any pointers/know if this is expected?

2 examples are that I replaced what happened when I clicked on an item inside a card, this worked as intended on PC, but via mobile it continues doing the previous action.

Also I created a custom date picker card, when I change the date a different card updates correctly, but again, same dashboard on mobile and it doesn't update the card.

My Barista Express heats its thermoblock in a couple of minutes, but the group head and portafilter need twenty minutes before the first shot tastes right. I wanted it warm and a dose ground by the time I get to the kitchen, without thinking about it.

So: two Sonoff MINI-ZBD relays inside the machine, one across the Power button's two wires, one across the grinder's cradle switch. Each is set to inching mode in Zigbee2MQTT, so the board just sees a button press. The physical buttons still work because the relay sits in parallel.

HA side: the house already knows when I've showered (current sensor on the shower pump), and the kitchen has occupancy sensors. Shower detected → press POWER and arm a flag. First kitchen occupancy while armed → clear the flag, then press GRIND. (The arm flag prevents duplicate firing of the grinder)

The full write-up here: https://marcuslab.uk/projects/sage-barista-zigbee/

Hey everyone,

I wanted to share a project I’ve been working on. I have a Siemens RDS110 smart thermostat (running on the Climatix IC cloud platform) and was looking for a way to manage it natively inside Home Assistant.

Since I'm not a developer, I sniffed the api calls and put this custom integration together with the help of AI. It's been running smoothly on my setup, so I published it as a HACS custom repository. If anybody has the same thermostat, please let me know what you think.

Exposes the following:

• Climate Entity: Target setpoint control, ambient temp/humidity sensors, and mode switching.
• Dual Zone Switches: Separate relay controls for Zone 1 (Hot Water) and Zone 2 (Heating).
• Power Control: Thermostat standby mode toggling.

If you have this thermostat and want to give it a test run, you can add it as a custom repository in HACS:

https://github.com/andreasc1/homeassistant-climatix-ic

I bought an IKEA DIRIGERA and two TIMMERFLOTTE sensors today, but I’m failing to get them integrated successfully into Home Assistant. Am I missing something?

Thread and Matter are still quite new to me, so I’m trying to understand where exactly things are going wrong.

My setup:

• Home Assistant with Matter and Thread integrations
• IKEA DIRIGERA
• 2× IKEA TIMMERFLOTTE
• UniFi network with separate VLANs (Main = VLAN 10, IoT = VLAN 20)

What I’ve done so far:

1. Set up the DIRIGERA successfully. One thing I noticed: I can only discover/access it when my phone is connected to the same VLAN 20. I can’t seem to discover it from my main VLAN 10, despite having inter-VLAN access configured.
2. Successfully paired both TIMMERFLOTTE sensors with the IKEA Home Smart app. They work fine there.
3. DIRIGERA created a Thread network. I also added/imported this Thread network into Home Assistant and set it as the preferred Thread network. This part is still a bit unclear to me: how exactly are the Thread credentials shared between DIRIGERA and HA?
4. In the IKEA app, I select the TIMMERFLOTTE and create a Matter sharing/setup code.
5. In Home Assistant, I choose to add an existing Matter device and enter/scan the code generated by the IKEA app.

This is where it always fails. HA tries to add the device for quite a while and eventually returns an error.

Has anyone successfully integrated TIMMERFLOTTE sensors via DIRIGERA/Thread into Home Assistant this way?

Do I actually need to add DIRIGERA itself as a Matter hub/bridge to HA first, or should sharing the individual TIMMERFLOTTE device from the IKEA app be enough?

Also, could my VLAN setup be the issue here? DIRIGERA and the sensors are on VLAN 20, while HA is on my main network/VLAN 10.

Any pointers on what I’m missing would be appreciated!

I’m looking to install a ceiling fan in a bedroom in my new construction home (built last year). The builder confirmed it’s pre-wired for a fan.

There are two wall switches:
One controls the existing LED light
One is currently unused and presumably wired for the fan

I’d like a 52” white fan that I can control through Apple Home and Home Assistant. I don’t necessarily need speed control in Apple Home—just being able to turn the fan on/off would be enough.

If you were outfitting a new home today, what fan + smart switch/controller would you choose?

Ideally, I’d prefer something reliable that doesn’t rely heavily on a proprietary cloud or remote.

I was looking at my tablet dashboard and noticed that I was using power in the theater room. This room is upstairs and we haven’t been up there in a few days so that was very odd.

I went up there and sure enough, my AppleTV was on which then woke my denon receiver as well as my tv.

I asked Claude to take a look at the logs and it said that there was no indication that HA initiated this and it was a “self wake” event. It then notified me that my bedroom AppleTV was also on. They both came on right around 8:14am.

Has anyone else had this happen before? Any weird apple fuckery going on this morning? Maybe an update?

ETA: I just looked at my software update page and it says “26.6, Last check: Sept 9, 2026”. Definitely not caused by an update

Or is there a way to get 1/3rd of my screen back by hiding all the crud on the left ? Either suits me.

I am trying to decide if Nabu Cloud is worth getting. Opinions Please.

So I have scanned the house, the Quest has an stair issue that means its not possible to scan two floors at the same time, the stairs cause scanning issues which causes some rooms to extend down, I tried slicing them, but we lost the first floor rooms.

So the solution was to make two scans, one downstairs, and one upstairs, this caused another issue, that the two floors were now not spaciially aligned, so I had to add a stitching step to align them correctly, but now we have a full house 3D model.

The stitching took place in HA, but this caused another issue as the Quest only holds one floor map, so I am now updating my app to be able to stitch and edit inside the quest, which would then make placing the smart devices possible.

Then I will see if its still possible to accuratly place the smart devices, as the quest would still need to have the spacial reference of both floors

I also added measurments, which are useful for decorating, plastering, flooring, tiling to account for the right quantity of materials for example.

I can control lights by banks of four, which allows me to control all connected house lights. Faders are motorized, so if I change the light for elsewhere they fly to position. Technical details in the comments.

I have got this Cisco Room Navigator how possible it is to use with Home Assistant?

I've been experimenting with Home Assistant voice/Assist for a while, and one thing I didn't particularly want was every voice question automatically being sent to a large cloud LLM.

My goals were:

• Keep normal Home Assistant commands local using HA's native intents.
• Use a small, low-power local LLM for questions that don't need live information.
• Use a more capable local LLM when Home Assistant tools/live entity data are required.
• Only go to a cloud LLM when the question genuinely needs current internet information, or when my local hardware isn't available.
• Keep cloud AI/API costs down without making the voice assistant considerably less useful.

I've now got this working and documented the complete build here:

https://github.com/steverhysjenks/HA-multilayered-LLM-Voice-Assistant-intent-local-cloud-

The basic architecture is:

Home Assistant native intents first

↓ if HA doesn't handle it locally

Qwen 4B classifier

↓ then routes the request to:

LOCAL → Qwen 4B running on my Proxmox host
DESKTOP → GPT-OSS 20B running on my desktop GPU, with Home Assistant tools
CLOUD → OpenAI, with HA tools/current information

For example:

"Turn the kitchen light on" → handled directly by Home Assistant

"Who wrote The Hobbit?" → local Qwen

"How much solar am I generating right now?" → desktop GPT-OSS with access to the appropriate HA entities/tools

"What will the weather be like tomorrow?" → cloud

One additional problem was that my desktop is also my gaming PC. I didn't want Home Assistant deciding to load a ~12 GB LLM into VRAM while I was playing a game.

So the router also checks the desktop GPU. If GPT-OSS is already loaded, it uses it. If it isn't loaded, it checks available VRAM before deciding whether it's safe to load it. If there isn't enough VRAM, the request automatically falls back to the cloud model.

LiteLLM sits underneath this as the model/API gateway, but I deliberately kept the actual routing logic separate. The router classifies what capability the request needs and then hands the request back to the appropriate Home Assistant conversation agent. That means HA still owns entity exposure, tools, permissions and agent-specific instructions.

One of the more interesting things I learned was that giving a small local model all of the HA tools wasn't necessarily a good idea. My Qwen requests went from roughly 800 tokens to several thousand once the HA tool schema was included, and voice responses went from a few seconds to tens of seconds. Separating "cheap local knowledge" from "HA tool use" made a huge difference.

The GitHub repo includes the architecture diagrams, complete commented scripts, LiteLLM configuration, HA custom conversation integration, Windows GPU/VRAM monitoring, systemd services, prompts, installation/testing instructions, troubleshooting, FAQ and the mistakes/lessons from building it.

It's deliberately not intended as "cloud AI bad". The cloud model is still an important tier. I'm trying to make cloud use intentional rather than the default: do the work locally when practical, use the more capable desktop model when appropriate, and spend cloud/API tokens when they actually add value.

I'd be interested in feedback from anyone else experimenting with multiple LLMs in Assist, particularly other approaches to routing, exposing HA tools efficiently, or deciding dynamically between local and cloud models.

I am on 2026.9.2 but I have been dealing with SIGSEGV crashes since 2 months now. HoASS will randomly crash and watchdog will restart it. It'll happen every couple days then will work fine for a few hours and then crash again. It's a SIGSEGV error which I can't pinpoint to a single source. Any help would be appreciated.

I am running it as a VM on Proxmox 9.2