I have automated blinds, and they are expensive. Solar charger was $49 which isn’t horrible.

You are close. HA will send out notices to your out of home phone, but your phone cannot connect back in. I send notices to my HA companion app on Android, and I receive notices while away from home reliably.

This is our third one. I would look for one that can be serviced, is self emptying and has mapping technology.

Not cheap, but a robotic vacuum. It’s a life saver with a shedding dog.

I wanted something I didn’t have to worry about. Beelink mini PC with an N150 and 16GB RAM.

Or just use this blueprint and it’s all done for you.

This automation also handles unavailable.

It scans the network and dynamically adds or removes batteries which it then reports on percentage level, or if the battery status is unavailable. Pretty ingenious actually.

It’s been around for years, so highly unlikely it’s AI. I wouldn’t call this a starting point for HA, but it did clean up my automations.

If you’re running HA, you don’t need an Aqara hub at all. Just add them to your Zigbee integration. ZHA or Z2M. No third party hub required.

Fair enough. I just didn’t want others who read your post to be misinformed.

Nabu Casa’s own documentation says the ZBT-2 does NOT support multi-protocols. The zbt-2 does work with Matter, but then won’t support Zigbee.

https://www.home-assistant.io/connect/zbt-2

“Connect ZBT-2 cannot do both Zigbee and Thread simultaneously. This technology is often called “multiprotocol” or “MultiPAN”. Though it is theoretically possible with the hardware within Connect ZBT-2, in our experience, this functionality doesn’t work well, and we don’t plan to implement it. We previously thoroughly tested multiprotocol with our Connect ZBT-1 adapter and found its operation to be inconsistent, often causing device stability issues. We do not believe multiprotocol is suitable for operation in the home, and strongly recommend dedicating a device to each protocol.”

Thanks kind stranger! Was not aware of this.

I’m certainly no expert, but are you talking about features available in Zigbee2MQTT? I can’t find anything like this using ZHA.

My first ‘issue’ is I have everything in ZHA. I want to move to Zigbee2MQTT, but with 40 zigbee devices and associated automations it’s a pita. So I figured get the zbt-2 and migrate that way. ZHA doesn’t report LQI and RSSI, so measuring the mesh isn’t completely empirical. First issue was a window sensor I use for the mailbox. It was a 3rd reality sensor and it was losing network connectivity about once a week. It’s just outside the front door, and I have a 3rd reality zigbee outlet in the front entrance. The Sonoff coordinator is mounted on the wall at the bottom of the stairs, which go down from the front entrance. (difficult to visualize, I know).

I then tried another window sensor on a closet door in the kitchen to trigger a light when the door was opened. Another zigbee outlet very close to the closet. Sensor (aqara in this case) can’t stay connected for 5 minutes.

So, considering I want to migrate to zigbee2mqtt anyway, I figured this was an opportunity to experience that pain.

Not sure if you have access to the pipes leading to the shower, but the droplet does what you’re looking to do.

https://hydrificwater.com/

I’ve been using the one offered here.

https://github.com/homeassistant-ai/ha-mcp

Before I configured Claude, I was completely lost with dashboards. With Claude, I had a couple of false starts, but I now have a fully working dashboard.

I have also used it to rationalize entity names for devices that have changed rooms/uses.

I have a couple of automations that are incredibly useful. I used Claude for all of them, but I will say a few of them needed tweaking.

Living Room blind: close blind if both people leave home. (we do not subscribe to nabu casa, had to be failed ping on phone). Then if either person returns home, open blind except if after sunset, then leave blind closed but turn on lights on driveway.

Washer/Dryer: We have a dumb washer / dryer. Used a 4 gang switch from Amazon to service 4 people. If you want to be notified when washer/dryer is done, press your button. If you want to unsubscribe double press button. Here’s the great part. Log all washer/dryer completions in a Google Sheet. (yep, Claude did that).

I have a bunch of others, but this post is too long already. (nfc tags, motion detector, etc).