Every state change in Home Assistant ends up in a database. A light turning on, a temperature reading, a phone's battery dropping by one percent, an ESP board reporting its Wi-Fi signal every few seconds. The recorder integration writes all of it, and with the defaults that is fine for a small setup. Add a few energy meters, a dozen ESPHome devices
The DS18B20 is the sensor people reach for when they want to know the temperature of something rather than the air in a room: the flow and return pipes of a heating system, a hot water tank, a freezer, an aquarium, the space under the floor. It comes in waterproof probes on a cable, it talks over a single data line, and you can hang several of them
Assist, the voice assistant built into Home Assistant, can run without any cloud service. A voice command then goes through four stages on your own hardware: wake word detection, speech-to-text, the conversation agent that works out what you meant, and text-to-speech for the reply. Home Assistant calls this chain a pipeline, and each stage can use
Getting a CO2 reading out of a Sensirion SCD41 takes about ten lines of ESPHome YAML. Keeping that reading honest over months is the harder part. The sensor corrects its own drift with an algorithm that makes assumptions about your room, and if the room doesn't meet them, the numbers slowly move away from reality without any error in the logs. Wiri
A heating automation in Home Assistant, or its Generic Thermostat integration, makes every on/off decision on the server. When Home Assistant restarts for an update, or Wi-Fi between it and the relay drops, nothing is in charge of the heater. ESPHome's thermostat climate platform moves the control loop onto the ESP32 itself. The board reads the tem
A Z-Wave network in Home Assistant has four parts: an adapter plugged into the server, a Z-Wave server (on Home Assistant OS, the Z-Wave JS app, formerly an add-on), the Z-Wave integration, and the devices. The first device usually joins within minutes. Most problems show up later and trace back to a few early decisions: which adapter you bought, w
An automation that works when you test it and then misses one evening in three is rarely a bug in Home Assistant. Most of these failures come from a handful of rules about how automations start, what counts as a change, what happens when an automation is triggered while it is still running, and what a restart does to a run in progress. Once you kno
Out of the box, Home Assistant only listens on your local network. That is the safest state it will ever be in, and every way of reaching it from outside changes that. The official documentation lists four routes: Home Assistant Cloud, a VPN, a reverse proxy and plain port forwarding. They differ in what ends up visible on the internet, what you ha
A cheap Wi-Fi plug runs firmware you cannot audit, and many of them talk to a cloud you do not control. On a flat home network that plug sits next to your laptop, your NAS and your phone. Moving smart devices to their own VLAN means a compromised gadget can reach Home Assistant and nothing else.
