Haier Threatens Legal Action Against Home Assistant Plugin Developer

Appliance manufacturer Haier has been integrating IoT features into their newer products, and as is so common these days, users are expected to install their “hOn” mobile application to…

A Dashboard Outside The Car

One of the biggest upsides of open communications standards such as CAN or SPI is that a whole world of vehicle hacking becomes available, from simple projects like adding sensors or computers to a…

Bed Sensors Do More Than You’d Think

Bed sensors do sort of sound like a gimmick — after all, who cares whether someone is occupying the bed? But if you think about it, that information is quite useful from a home automation sta…

The Dark Side Of Hacking XMas Lights, Literally

When looking at the piles of cheap RGB, Bluetooth-controlled LED strips you can find for sale just about anywhere these days, integrating them into a home-automation setup is very tempting. Normall…

Heat Pump Control That Works

Heat pumps are taking the world by storm, and for good reason. Not only are they many times more efficient than electric heaters, but they can also be used to provide cooling in the summer. Efficie…

Smart Doorbell Focuses On Privacy

As handy as having a smart doorbell is, with its ability to remotely see who’s at the front door from anywhere with an Internet connection, the off-the-shelf units are not typically known for…

2023 Hackaday Prize: A Smart Powermeter That You Actually Want

[Jon] wanted to keep track of his home power use, but didn’t want to have to push his data up to some cloud service that’s just going to leave him high and dry in the future. So he went completely …

Ventbots Are Fans Of HVAC And Home Automation

[WJCarpenter] had a common HVAC problem; not all the rooms got to a comfortable temperature when the heater was working to warm up their home. As often happens with HVAC systems, the rooms farthest…

Google Home Scripting

It is always controversial to have home assistants like the ones from Google or Amazon. There are privacy concerns, of course. Plus they maddeningly don’t always do what you intend for them t…

Hack Simple

Here at Hackaday, we definitely love to celebrate the hard hacks: the insane feats of reverse engineering, the physics-defying flights of fancy, or the abuse of cutting edge technology. But today I…

ChatGPT Rules The World… Or, At Least, The Home

With all the hype about ChatGPT, it has to have crossed your mind: how can I make it control devices? On the utopia side, you could say, “Hey, ChatGPT, figure out what hours I’m usually…

Hexed Home Assistant Monitors 3D Printers

You can babysit your 3D printer 100% of the time, or you can cross your fingers and hope it all works. Some monitor their printers using webcams, but [Simit] has a more stylish method of keeping ta…

When Your Smart Light Switches Stop Working, Build Your Own

If you want smart light switches in your house, you can buy from any one of hundreds of manufacturers. [Brian Boyle] had kitted out his home with TP Link devices, but after a few years of use, he f…

Smart Occupancy Sensor Knows All

In the last few decades, building engineers and architects have made tremendous strides in improving the efficiency of various buildings and the devices that keep them safe and comfortable to live …

A Smart Home That CAN Do It All

In an ideal smart home, the explosion of cheap WiFi and Bluetooth chips has allowed hundreds of small wireless devices to control the switches, lights, and everything else required for a “sma…

Arduino Library Brings Rtl_433 To The ESP32

If you have an RTL-SDR compatible radio there’s an excellent chance you’ve heard of the rtl_433 project, which lets you receive and decode signals from an ever-expanding list of support…

When Pi Supply Falls Short, Thin Clients Stand Tall For Home Automation And Low Power Computing

Do you need a cheap, small computer for a low power computing project? Historically, of us would reach straight for a Raspberry Pi, even if we didn’t absolutely need the GPIO. But with prices…

Trigger Your Home Automation Routines With Home Buttons

Home automation systems are all well and good, so long as the person who built it all is around to drive it. Let’s face it, they’re quite often a complex web of interconnected systems, …

Scroll Through ESPHome With IPod-style Click Wheel

While you’d be hard pressed to find a Hackaday writer that feels any nostalgia for the DRM nonsense the iPod helped to introduce, we’ve got to admit that we miss that click wheel. Spinn…