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Show HN: Connecting my dumb garage and car's homelink buttons to Home Assistant
5 days ago
- Problem: Difficulty opening garage door after walks with baby and wanting car Homelink buttons to lock/unlock front door without using phone.
- Solution: Use Zooz Zen16 multirelay for smart garage control and Liftmaster 850LM to receive Homelink signals for automations.
- Installation: Wire 850LM to Zen16 switches, connect reed sensor to detect door open/close, and wire garage door opener to Zen16 relay.
- Home Assistant configuration: Set Zen16 parameters to define door sensor, momentary switches, and relay behavior; exclude/re-include device for sensor entity.
- Security: Rolling codes mitigate some risks; presence check or wiring remote through Zen16 can prevent unauthorized garage access.
- Outcome: Smooth stroller return and easy door unlocking via car buttons.
Reverse-engineering is cheap now
8 days ago
- Coding agents are being used by people to reverse-engineer and automate home devices, illustrating the impact of reduced code writing costs.
- Previously, reverse-engineering home devices was possible but rarely worth the effort due to low ROI and the burden of maintaining unstable APIs.
- Coding agents drastically lower the effort and cost of trying and failing, and reduce the psychological baggage of future maintenance.
- Recent articles include: Kimi K3 and the pelican benchmark (July 16), new GPT-5.6 family (Luna, Terra, Sol) (July 9), and sqlite-utils 4.0 with schema migrations (July 7).
Two nasty surprises in Home Assistant's config
23 days ago
- Motorized rolling shutters for automated control via Home Assistant.
- Created automations for temperature-based shutter management using boolean sensors.
- Encountered timezone issues affecting automation triggers, related to daylight saving time.
- Configured timezone in YAML, which reset UI settings, requiring full reconfiguration.
- Identified two bugs in Home Assistant: time-based automation offset and UI settings loss.
RF hacking my cloud-controlled ceiling fan
a month ago
- The author replaced their bedroom ceiling fan with a cloud-controlled Dreo fan and wanted local control via Home Assistant to avoid cloud dependencies.
- They decoded the RF remote's commands by identifying the carrier frequency, modulation method (ASK/OOK), and payload structure, using an RTL-SDR to capture and analyze the signal.
- To replay commands, they used a Xiao ESP32-C6 board with an RFM69HCW transceiver, manually toggling the data pin with decoded pulse timings and debugging with the RTL-SDR.
- The setup integrates with Home Assistant via MQTT, with the ESP32 subscribing to topics to trigger RF commands and maintaining an internal state for fan and light controls.
- The project successfully enables reliable local control without cloud reliance, with the transmitter working stably for nearly a year and controlled via Siri.

Hasty Briefsbeta

home automation

Show HN: Connecting my dumb garage and car's homelink buttons to Home Assistant

Reverse-engineering is cheap now

Two nasty surprises in Home Assistant's config

RF hacking my cloud-controlled ceiling fan