Sometimes I leave a room for a short amount of time, like for eating dinner. After dinner, I want to come back into that room and continue with whatever I was doing. I don't want to leave my lights and my radio on all the time, so I turn them off whenever I leave. When I come back, I have to turn everything back on to the configuration I had before manually (like only turning on the reading lamp or putting the desk lamp to cold white for concentration). Using Home Assistant, I can now save the configuration of my lights and my radio, and restore them when I come back into my room.

Shouldn't be a problem, right? Just connect your Echo device via AUX to the receiver, and voilá. But there is a problem: The receiver has to be on in order to hear Alexa's responses or music.

I want to hear my music through my "good" speakers, and when they are off, I want Alexa to answer me through the "okay" speakers of my Echo Show.

After we ran out of sparkling water twice in a row, I decided to do something against that. The plan is to receive a notification when there are only three bottles left:

#Ideas

I need a way to sense how many bottles are left. Here are some ideas I had:

• putting a light sensor under each bottle in the box
• put a scale under the crate
• use a camera and a neural network to do some object detection

I don't know enough about neural networks and object detection, but I think this would be rather complicated and overpowered for what I want to achieve. It may be really hard to distinguish full bottles of water from empty ones, even I lift them slightly to check if they are full or empty. It could work for colored beverages though.

Using light sensors for each bottle is still an idea I want to check out in the future, as this solves the weight problem I'll go into in the next section.

I have a screen that goes above my balcony door. If the door has been left open and I accidentally said "Alexa, turn on cinema mode" from downstairs, my screen probably wouldn't be as smooth anymore. I control my screen via Home Assistant, you can read more in another article here. It's a cover, which can be opened, closed or stopped.

The plan is to create a template_cover that only opens the real cover if the balcony door is closed.

Bitwarden is a great open source password manager. Your vault is encrypted with your master key, so even if someone hacks into the Bitwarden Servers (which are hosted on Microsoft Azure), they will only get some unreadable gibberish. If your master password is strong, you should be save.

If you are paranoid about the server security and want to be in full control, or want the premium features for free because you have a webspace anyway, you can self-host Bitwarden.

Bitwarden provides docker containers, but they are big and difficult to install. Uberspace is a web hoster for command line enthusiasts, and while it supports nearly everything, docker isn't.

In this tutorial, we will use a Rust implementation of the bitwarden api. You can check the project out on GitHub: https://github.com/dani-garcia/bitwarden_rs

Having your windows connected to Home Assistant opens many possibilities. I've written down some ideas on what you could do with such information:

• 🚨 Create an alarm panel, so when a window is being opened while you are away, the siren rings and you get a text message
• 📱 Be notified which windows are still open before you leave
• 🌡️ Turn off the heater when someone opens a window
• ❄️ Ring a bell when the windows are open for too long
• ... and possibly much more

I don’t have a TV in my room, but I have a projector. Until now I used to watch movies on my wallpaper, but the wallpaper is textured so the image quality is bad. So I decided to buy a screen, motorized of course to integrate it into my smart home. I've chosen this one.

After installing the screen on the ceiling, I immediately tried it out. The first problem I had was the screen lowering itself too far (1:1 aspect ratio) but I wanted it to stop at an aspect ratio of 16:9. While some people claim there are potentiometers to tweak the endstops, I didn’t found them and as this can result in damaging the screen, I discarded this idea.