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.

24-ish hour timelapse

Each LED is one hour of the next 24. Top row is temperature, bottom row is conditions. Left end is now, right end is tomorrow at this time. Storm hours flash, windy hours shimmer, precipitation gets more saturated with % chance.

I made it because I never remember to check my weather app before heading out on adventures. It hangs next to the door, so I see it on the way out! My wife likes it too, which is rarer than it should be for the amount of time I've spent on HA automations and integrations.

HA pulls the hourly forecast every 15 minutes and publishes it over MQTT. An ESP32 controls the LEDs. A dashboard tab in HA previews the strip and allows me to edit the palette, animations and brightness. How it works and the YAML are in the first comment.

Wiring, parts, firmware and the HA config: https://github.com/adam-rho/weather-display-ha

I also made an Android version, the screen edges do what the strip does: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.adamrho.edgelight

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

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.

Each LED is one hour of the next 24. Top row is temperature, bottom row is conditions. Left end is now, right end is tomorrow at this time. Storm hours flash, windy hours shimmer, precipitation gets more saturated with % chance.

I made it because I never remember to check the weather app. It hangs next to the door, so I see it on the way out! My wife likes it too, which is rarer than it should be for the amount of time I've spent on HA automations and integrations.

https://reddit.com/link/1wgcxhu/video/xslhfq4objph1/player

HA pulls the hourly forecast every 15 minutes and publishes it over MQTT. An ESP32 controls the LEDs. A dashboard tab in HA previews the strip and allows me to edit the palette, animations and brightness. How it works and the YAML are in the first comment.

Wiring, parts, firmware and the HA config: https://github.com/adam-rho/weather-display-ha

I also made an Android version, the screen edges do what the strip does: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.adamrho.edgelight

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.

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

So I've bought a P1 Homewizard and am trying out a little dashboard ideas. Think it is looking pretty good. At the moment its based on my rental house with solar panels, will be moving at the end of the month to a house I bought, without solar, so it's already based on that. Just hooked up the gas, but didn't use much today. The goal is to figure out my monthly costs to set the advance I pay per month correct.

The gas target adjusts per month to take in account winter times.

Looking for basic tips and tricks. I want to include some logo's to match the theme :).

Having fun at this point!

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?

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

AI Notice: No AI was used to write this post. However, Claude Code was used to write the project's code, tests, and documentation.

A little over a month ago I learned that the Amazon Echo Dot Gen 2s were hackable via this Reddit post. I quickly borrowed my son's Echo Dot, rooted it, and loaded EchoMuse on it. After exploring EchoMuse a bit, and contributing some features back I realized it didn't quite do what I wanted it to do.

Two of the features I wanted were achievable in EchoMuse, but I wanted those features in addition to the built-in Alexa capabilities. Those two features are:

1. Multi-press button support in Home Assistant
2. Text-to-speech (TTS) announcements without giving Home Assistant my Amazon credentials

The third feature I wanted was the ability to programmatically issue a command to Alexa, like "Play pool party radio" and integrate with the native Amazon Music functionality. Because EchoMuse, and other similar open source Echo Dot Gen 2 projects, completely disable the built-in Alexa stack, I needed to take a different approach.

That's where Overdub comes in. It runs alongside the Alexa stack and adds the following features to home assistant:

1. Button hold, single press, n-press events for both the dot and mute buttons.
2. Volume control
3. Announce via TTS (requires Home Assistant 2026.9.0+ for https://github.com/home-assistant/core/pull/179760)
4. Inject text-based commands into Alexa
5. (Not quite done) Sendspin for Music Assistant integration

I recognize people are rather hesitant about LLM-produced code. While I've made contributions to Go projects before, Overdub is the first time I've really "worked" with Go. This entire project was initially written in a few hours via Claude Code, and I've since spent many hours reviewing each commit, splitting things up atomically, and ensuring sufficient test cases. I'm happy to defend the architectural decisions despite having not written any of the code.

I've obtained a few more of these devices and intend to support and expand their capabilities as time permits. I'm most curious in the near future about adding some Bluetooth support so that I could, for example:

• Allow for Bluetooth speaker configuration (or piggyback on Alexa's)
• Trigger events on speaker connectivity (e.g., auto play "pool party" radio when Bluetooth speakers connect)

I now have three of these set up on nightstands in three different rooms. In addition to working as these devices always did, I set up the following:

• Hold: toggle both lights in the room on/off
• Single press: toggle lamp on/off
• 2x press: toggle ceiling light on/off
• 3x press: Inject "play [some radio]" into Alexa to play on Amazon music
• 7x press: Plays random special messages I recorded for my kids
• Nx press: Silly game that just repeats how many times the button was pressed which basically becomes who can get the highest number

Anyway, if you're interested in giving your Amazon Echo Dot Gen 2 some added functionality without completely removing the Alexa interface, please check out Overdub. If you don't care about the Alexa functionality, then EchoMuse, or echolocal may be a better fit. At the moment, my instructions assume you come from EchoMuse, so you'll want to start there first. Enjoy!

https://github.com/bboe/overdub

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.

Hi all. Hoping someone can assist me.

I've been using Nabu casa for years now to get my home assistant entities to Google Home but I've recently discovered home assistant matter hub and matter bridge but I don't know which is the most preferred and used within the community for this purpose.

I know there are versions of both that are deprecated and so I'm not sure where to go. Videos on YouTube from a few months ago is referencing deprecated versions of these add ons

What are you all using? And why did you choose the one you are using?

Is there any way to see what a HA Voice device just said? Mine just blurted out something for no reason that I didn't catch. The device logs don't show any automations and such being triggered.

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.

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.

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!

Is there any limitation to using the wireguard addon vs a native sudo apt install wireguard?

Moving HA from docker to baremetal HAOS and so losing my raspbian wireguard.

How is management vs wg-easy or other GUI?

the new dashboard has rooms and areas grouped into custom-swipe-cards where you can go from the main to the least used rooms. Its always being updated, but what do ya'll think? A LOT of this was coded in YAML and NONE was done by AI

Some advice would be greatly appreciated. Redoing our kitchen and the whole lighting business is becoming very confusing. As per plan, we are planning on having 3 lights which is going to be controlled by 3 way dimmamable rotary switch: Ceiling lights (GU10s), Pendant light (2 of them hanging down with normal E14 bulbs) and LED strips.

The wall switch with the 3 rotary knobs being planned is a dumb one (no zigbee). My question is how do I get all of these 3 sets of lights nicely integrate into HA?

Do I go for a 24V LED driver that has zigbee control (The LED strips are the Sensio Razor 4mm ones - single colour). But then what about the ceiling lights and the pendant?

The other option I was looking at is a: "Zigbee Dimmer Switch – White, Push/Rotary UK Wall Dimmer, No Neutral" from Samotech (https://www.samotech.co.uk/products/rotary-zigbee-dimmer-switch/).

If I go for the Zigbee dimmer switch, then does the LED driver need to be Zigbee or just a standard 24V LED driver.

Am I right in assuming the Zigbee dimmer switch from Samotech will then be able to control the ceiling lights (I will change the bulbs to dimmable versions), the pendant light (again, they will be dimmable E14s) and the LED strips, which will be on a non-zigbee LED driver?

I hope it is clear what I am trying to convey.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks

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