Home Assistant is the control centre of my house and homelab. These guides cover the parts I had to work out myself: moving a Zigbee network to new hardware, getting devices to behave, building cards and dashboards, and keeping the instance secure.
1. Zigbee, Matter and devices
- Zigbee2MQTT Coordinator Migration: Sonoff Dongle-E to SLZB-MR3 — move the whole network without re-pairing.
- Kitchen Light with a MOES Zigbee Knob — a rotary dimmer that feels right.
- Syncing Two Matter Lights in Home Assistant — keep paired lights in step.
- Home Assistant Local AI Hub with Matter 1.3 — private voice and automations without the cloud.
- IP Camera Stream Discovery with the Strix Add-on — find the RTSP URL of an undocumented camera.
- Creality K1 Max Moonraker Helper Script — the 3D printer in Home Assistant.
2. Cards, dashboards and wall panels
- Sensor Legend Card for Home Assistant — a custom card for readable sensor states.
- Custom Dashboard Strategies API (2026.5) — what the new developer API changes.
- postmarketOS on a Samsung T560 as a dashboard and its camera for motion wake-up — an old tablet turned into a wall panel.
- ESP32 touch panels have their own page: ESP32 and ESPHome guides.
3. Security and monitoring
- CrowdSec with Nginx Proxy Manager on Home Assistant OS and the CrowdSec dashboard for active bans.
- SMART Sniffer drive health setup and its notifications — disk warnings in Home Assistant.
4. Release notes worth reading
- Home Assistant 2026.4 New Features — the Areas dashboard and what changed for automations.