Deeper dive · Home Assistant

Sensors, switches and the brain

Home Assistant runs the house from a virtual machine, with nearly a thousand entities behind it. These are the devices that matter and the automations that make them feel like a home rather than a control panel.

Sensing

Presence, not just motion. Millimetre-wave presence sensors in the bathrooms know someone is there even when they are perfectly still — so the lights stay on in the shower and switch off only when the room is truly empty, with a stale-state watchdog as the safety net.
Climate. Every air conditioner is controllable (Sensibo controllers, with local HomeKit twins under evaluation), and room temperatures are answerable by voice in any of three languages.
Energy. Zigbee smart plugs with power metering on the office, the bedroom charger and the kitchen — measurement first, automation second.
Cameras with names. Frigate watches the important rooms with on-device AI: person detection, and face recognition that announces family members by name through the living-room speaker. Four years of photos trained it; nothing leaves the house.
Environment. Air quality from a neighbourhood monitoring station feeds the dashboards with a staleness guard, and per-drive temperature sensors make the NAS a first-class citizen of the smart home.
The desktop gaming PC, telemetry included. CPU and GPU load, temperatures and power draw stream into a dedicated dashboard page whenever the machine is up — and the page tidies itself away when it is not.

Acting

Automations follow one doctrine: deterministic first. Presence lighting, drive cooling (the full guide), overheat escalation, doorbell-style face announcements and the voice fast-paths are all fixed logic that behaves the same way every time; the AI layer sits above for the requests that genuinely need understanding. Dashboards got the same care — twelve views redesigned around the iPad that lives on the wall, in a glass theme built for demos.