Home Assistant

The idea

I'm a chronic builder. So of course I looked at my house and thought: "this needs an API." Home Assistant is my home's control plane — automations, scenes, and quick controls that turn "tiny annoyances" into "handled." I'm not trying to build a sci‑fi house. I'm trying to make the normal stuff work without thinking about it.

Automations (the fun part)

• Shades that open/close on a schedule (plus sunrise/sunset logic), with physical button overrides.
• A DIY blinds controller: an ESP32 + breadboard + RF antenna that replaced a proprietary “bridge” that cost a couple hundred bucks (mine was ~$20 and it works great).
• One‑tap media controls for Sonos (play/pause, skip) because finding your phone is not a feature.
• A nightly “turn the sign off” timer, so future‑me doesn’t wake up to “why is this still on?”
• Hosting mode experiments (because dinner parties are more fun when the house does the boring parts).

Dashboard (the “make it feel real” part)

• A clean mobile-first dashboard for quick status checks and control.
• Simple observability: network speed checks, device state, and “is anything weird?” at a glance.
• Design tweaks that make it feel less like an admin panel and more like a product.

Tech stack