Thread took years to fix what Zigbee got right from day one
Jasmine Mannan Jun 26, 2026, 3:30 PM EDT Jasmine is Software and PC Hardware Author at XDA with years of tech reporting experience ranging from AI chatbots right down to gaming…
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Home Assistant just made every infrared device in your house controllable, and you probably already own them
…With a small, affordable IR blaster acting as a bridge, Home Assistant lets you control any device that responds to an infrared remote without any hardware modifications. Related My smart home still…
I built an ESP32 display to stop obsessing over my NAS drive temperatures
…Related I added an open‑source ESP32 dashboard to my Home Assistant setup, and I'm glad I did It's a customizable display that can fit practically anywhere in my smart…
Local LLMs changed how I use Home Assistant, and now my smart devices actually listen
…dashboards, cards, and device-specific integrations borderlines essential, the AI-specific tools have a special place in my setup. After all, few things can match the convenience of an LLM-controlled Home…
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4 tools I install on every new home server before setting up anything else
4d agoI stopped logging into my homelab dashboard after connecting these 4 MCP servers to Claude Code
6d agoThe $20 "Cheap Yellow Display" is the best addition to my smart home in months
1w agoHomarr is packed with features, but Glance is what I actually use on my home servers
1w agoI ditched my Debian VM for the immutable Lightwhale OS, and Docker containers have never been simpler
…PC Maximum value budget homelab. A Docker-only OS that refuses to be anything else Immutable OS that boots from ISO Lightwhale isn't a Docker dashboard for managing all containers. Nor…
I built a $15 ESP32 display that lets me monitor my Bambu Lab printer from my desk
…want to run Home Assistant, but for me, having the printer data flow through Home Assistant means I can also use it in automations, notifications, and other dashboards. The ESP32 display is…
I replaced my smart bulbs with smart relays and saved my family from home automation fatigue
…True smart home stability means making the switch to infrastructure intelligent , not the glass bulb itself. Moving to inline smart relays eliminates domestic tension, protects your hardware from offline states, and rescues…
Your home network doesn't need Pi-hole — an $8 ESP32 blocks ads just as well for a fraction of the cost
…His expertise broadly covers computers, smartphones, game consoles, headphones, smart home products, browsers, and apps. Sign in to your XDA account Whenever someone mentions ad-blocking on a home networking forum, the…
Pi-hole showed me 65,000 DNS queries in hours, and I didn't like where they were going
…my personal devices, home lab, family devices, and smart devices. So, implementing it network-wide was the best solution possible. While setting up Pi-hole via its admin dashboard, everything seemed like…
A $15 Raspberry Pi Zero 2W does Pi-hole better than any spare PC you have lying around
…Most services on the home server fail gracefully. For instance, Jellyfin buffers, a file share times out and retries. But a DNS failure takes the network down with it. Dedicated hardware for…