home assistant

A collection of 8 posts

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Jul 13, 2025 home assistant automation entities

Loosely coupled configuration for Home Assistant

This is the 8th post in the My journey with Home Assistant focus series. This post will be short, but I hope useful. My home is getting more and more connected, and the number of my automations grow each month. Recently, I equipped my roller shutters with connected Somfy engines so they could roll down automatically when it’s too hot in summer. Spoiler: given the current heatwave, it’s a boon!

Nicolas Fränkel
May 18, 2025 home assistant entity state temperature netatmo

Getting a single value from a device's state in Home Assistant

This is the 7th post in the My journey with Home Assistant focus series. I recently acquired Netatmo smart radiator valves to manage my rooms' temperature remotely. I’m not skilled at manual tasks, but I could easily replace the old thermo-static valves. I then registered the smart ones in the Netatmo app. Finally, I integrated them in my Home Assistant via the dedicated Netatmo integration. Everything was very straightforward.

Nicolas Fränkel
May 11, 2025 home assistant cloudflare cloudflare tunnel

Cloudflare Tunnel for Home Assistant

This is the 6th post in the My journey with Home Assistant focus series. I continue to take care of my Home Assistant. This week, I replaced my original setup with Cloudflare Tunnel.

Nicolas Fränkel
Jan 12, 2025 home assistant ios

The Home Assistant companion app

Besides a regular webapp and a Mac app, which uses the same endpoints as the webapp, Home Assistant also provides mobile apps. In this post, I want to describe its advantages over the former. I’ll use iOS to do this: Samsung’s French partner to recycle used mobiles tricked me once, and I moved away from Samsung. I decided to buy Apple for better integration since I’ve had Mac computers for the last few years.

Nicolas Fränkel
Dec 22, 2024 home assistant hacs

An example of HACS: Adaptive Lighting

In the previous post of this focus, we replaced Philips Hue automation with the one from Home Assistant. One significant gap we noticed was that Home Assistant doesn’t automatically adjust the brightness according to the time of the day, a feature Philips Hue offers. In this post, we are going to address this gap. The first step when wanting to add a feature to Home Assistant is to browse through available integrations.

Nicolas Fränkel
Dec 8, 2024 home assistant philips hue

Replace Philips Hue automation with Home Assistant's

This is the 3rd post in the My journey with Home Assistant focus series. I’m the happy owner of a couple of Philips Hue connected lights for a some years. Some of them are colored, some of them regular. In addition, I bought a sensor to go along with the light I installed in my toilets: it turns on automatically when its detects a movement there. In this post, I want to document how I replaced the proprietary automation with Home Assistant’s.

Nicolas Fränkel
Dec 1, 2024 home assistant

The Home Assistant model

Home Assistant is a massive beast. It can be overwhelming for a newcomer; it was for me. In this post, I want to describe the underlying model of Home Assistant, which is a good entry point for your home automation journey.

Nicolas Fränkel
Nov 24, 2024 home assistant

Why Home Assistant?

This is the 1st post in the My journey with Home Assistant focus series. Last June, I spoke at Berlin Buzzwords. In all honesty, I rarely attend others' talks for a variety of reasons: lack of time, lack of energy, no interest in the proposed subjects, etc. When I do, I go either for subjects I know and want to deepen my understanding of or for subjects I know nothing about to get a foot in the door. This time, I attended Monitoring your home, with DevOps observability tools.

Nicolas Fränkel
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