Home Assistant
What it is
Home Assistant runs the smart home: lights, sensors, presence and the ESPHome-based devices around the house.
Story
Most of the work here is reliability, not features: BLE proxies that recover themselves, Zigbee networks that survive a reboot, and automations that fail quietly instead of loudly.
Journal
Reading CPU temperature into Home Assistant
Home Assistant has no CPU temperature sensor out of the box. On a Raspberry Pi, the kernel already exposes one.
A firmware watchdog for a BLE proxy
When an ESP32 Bluetooth scanner silently stopped, the fix was a watchdog that runs on the device itself.
Controlling an IR air conditioner with Zigbee2MQTT
IR is one-way and AC remotes send full state, not button presses. That shapes the whole integration.
Open Source
wyoming-cloud-tts
Wyoming Protocol TTS adapter for Home Assistant with multilingual cloud speech synthesis.