Home Assistant can help you to do useful things, such as turning lights on and off or controlling your heating, but not every automation has to be completely practical. These are some of the coolest things I’ve done using Home Assistant.

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4 Home Assistant blueprints that saved me hours of effort

You don’t need to reinvent the wheel.

Snarky doorbell descriptions

Mostly pointless, but a lot of fun

Credit: Adam Davidson / How-to Geek

When I saw online that people were doing this, I knew I had to set it up. I have a Reolink video doorbell, and when a person is detected at the door, or someone rings the bell, it sends a notification to my phone, including a snapshot of the doorbell feed so I can see who it is. A notification also pops up on my smart TV, and it isn’t possible to include the snapshot.

I wanted a way to describe who was at the door, so that the smart TV notification would give us a clue as to who it was without having to pull out our phones and check the notification. There’s a really useful Home Assistant integration called LLM Vision that can analyze images using an LLM and generate descriptions of the images.

You can use a prompt to specify the style of these descriptions, so that the integration gives snarky and humorous descriptions that roast the appearance of whoever is at the door. It’s never been so fun to find out who is at the door.

A morning briefing in my own voice

Alexa is out of a job

Credit: Adam Davidson / How-To Geek

My morning briefing automation has grown and grown. It started life as a single reminder on trash day, which told me which collection was due when I first walked into the kitchen on the appropriate day. Since then, it’s grown to a full-scale morning briefing that pulls information from Google Calendar and announces what everyone has on for the day.

The announcement plays through an Echo smart speaker, so originally, it used Alexa’s voice. Eventually, I replaced it with a different TTS model that was a little less annoying. It still wasn’t good enough, though.

Finally, I used Qwen3-TTS to clone my voice, and can now generate the morning briefing so that it sounds like it’s me delivering it. My wife cloned her voice, too, and it’s completely random as to which voice gets used each day. The quality of the cloned voices is really good, and it beats Alexa by a long stretch.

Announcements that get me out of my chair

The nudge I’d been needing

Credit: Adam Davidson / How-To Geek

I sit at my desk to write, and will often get carried away when I’m working, not leaving my seat for hours at a time. This is incredibly bad for my health; being sedentary can lead to significant health issues. The problem isn’t that I don’t want to get up and move about; it’s that I forget.

I have an mmWave presence sensor in my home office that turns lights on and off and sleeps and wakes my computers, but it’s possible to set up specific zones within the room, too. I set up a zone for my office chair, and the sensor can tell when I’m sitting in the chair and when I’m not.

I created an automation that kicks in once I’ve been sitting in the chair for half an hour straight. It reminds me to get up and repeats at ever-decreasing intervals until I finally get up. If I keep ignoring it, it starts listing all the medical conditions that can be caused by being sedentary, and this is usually enough to get me to leap up and move around.

Compatibility

ESP Home

Weight

40g

Featuring multi-target tracking, support for zones, light level sensing, Bluetooth proxy and support for multiple different mmWave sensors, the Lite offers next level features for a more pocket-friendly point.

Better presence simulation

It really looks like I’m home

When I was a kid, I thought I would make my fortune by inventing a system that turned your lights on and off when you were away to trick burglars into thinking you were home. Sadly, by the time I’d grown up, the idea had already been done.

Turning lights on and off with timers is fine, but it’s not the most convincing presence simulation. Thankfully, there’s a really clever Home Assistant integration called Presence Simulation that works by using the state history of selected devices in your home. When you turn the presence simulation on, those devices will turn on and off at the same times as they did when you were at home.

This means that your home acts exactly like it did when you were in it. Anyone considering breaking into your home is far less likely to try it when your lights, media players, blinds, and more are all doing the same things that they do when you’re at home, all at the exact same times.

A “Now Playing” display, no matter the speaker

My Echo Show is actually useful now

Credit: Adam Davidson/How-To Geek

I have a few Echo Show devices in my home, and they’re far less useful than I imagined they would be when I bought them. That was until I discovered that you could jailbreak an Echo Show 5 and use it to display whatever you wanted.

I now use the Echo Show in my home office as a “Now Playing” screen that displays the current song, with the album artwork as the background, and a simple set of controls that I can use to pause or skip songs. The beauty is that the screen will display whatever is currently playing in Music Assistant, regardless of which device it’s playing on. Whether I’m using a smart speaker, my hi-fi system, or even my phone, the Echo Show will always display the appropriate track.

My ultimate medication reminder

Home Assistant gave me what other apps couldn’t

Credit: Adam Davidson/How-To Geek

I have to take medication every day, and I would always forget. I used all sorts of apps, from Apple’s own Medications app to third-party alternatives, but they were always lacking some key feature I wanted.

I decided to build my own. It sends a critical notification when it’s time to take my meds and will keep sending them every half hour until I log the tablets as taken. I can pause the alerts for a longer period if I need to, and if I’m away from home, I can pause the alerts until I get back home again.

It works incredibly well and has removed a constant source of stress and annoyance. Now I don’t need to remember to take my medication; Home Assistant remembers for me.

I have so much more I want to do

These are some of the cool things that I’ve done with Home Assistant, but there is so much more I want to do. My next project is to set up hamster monitoring for the kids’ pet using a smart camera and Frigate.