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Latest entry
The First Matter Tap-to-Pair Sensor Showed Up at IFA. My Home Assistant Box Cannot Tap Anything.
Read the log: The First Matter Tap-to-Pair Sensor Showed Up at IFA. My Home Assistant Box Cannot Tap Anything.Matter 1.6 lets you commission a device by tapping a phone against it, with no QR code, no Bluetooth and no power. Heiman showed the first sensor doing it at IFA this week. The gap between that demo and my mini PC is the interesting part.
Recent entries
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The First Matter Tap-to-Pair Sensor Showed Up at IFA. My Home Assistant Box Cannot Tap Anything.
Matter 1.6 lets you commission a device by tapping a phone against it, with no QR code, no Bluetooth and no power. Heiman showed the first sensor doing it at IFA this week. The gap between that demo and my mini PC is the interesting part.
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Modbus Was Home Assistant’s Last YAML Holdout. 2026.9 Started Taking It Apart.
Home Assistant 2026.9 lets integrations share a single Modbus connection instead of fighting over the bus. Only three integrations use it so far — but the standalone library underneath is the part worth watching.
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Home Assistant Green Is $199 Now. Here Is When I Would Still Buy One Over My Used Mini PC.
Nabu Casa raised the Green’s price twice this year and said the quiet part out loud: it is RAM. That same shortage is repricing the used mini PCs I usually recommend instead — so I re-ran the comparison, electricity and all.
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8,616 People Described Their Smart Homes. Then the Foundation Published the Raw Answers.
The Open Home Foundation released the anonymised dataset from its first Home Assistant community survey — 8,616 responses, free to download. I went looking for myself in the numbers and found something more interesting than my own reflection.
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Somebody Finally Made Firmware Updates Boring. It Wasn’t Home Assistant.
Homey now updates Matter, Zigbee and Z-Wave firmware from one screen. Home Assistant has all the same pieces scattered across three integrations — and a drawer of my devices has never been flashed at all.
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My Home Assistant Database Was 5.8 GB. Most of It Was Signal Strength.
Restoring my box from backup was fast until one 5.8 GB file showed up. Here’s what I cut from Recorder, what I deliberately kept, and the free-space trap in the repack step.
One house, going fully automated — documented honestly
No sponsor scripts, no spec-sheet worship. Just a working log of every room as it gets wired, what broke, and what I’d do differently. If it didn’t earn its place, it doesn’t make the site.
Read the full storyGear I actually use
Zigbee PIR Sensor
Fast trigger, two-year battery, and rock-solid local control. The one in every room.
Thread radio
Home Assistant Connect ZBT-2
The official HA stick, running OpenThread — the anchor of my local-first Thread network. No big-tech hub required.
Dimmable Smart Bulbs
Warm-to-cool tuning that actually holds state after a power cut. Worth the extra.
The newsletter for people building it themselves
One email when a new build log lands — plus the small wins and dumb mistakes that don’t make the site. Free, weekly-ish, no spam.