3 Home Assistant projects to do more with your smart home this weekend (May 1 - 3)
Some smart home projects are so impressive that you want to show them off to the world. Others may seem pretty dull, but can be incredibly useful. A project that tracks your groceries or measures your energy usage may not sound thrilling, but it can make a big difference in your day-to-day life.
Manage your life with Grocy
Automate the mundane
A smart home is meant to take the boring jobs off your hands. This doesn't just mean turning your lights on and off; it can help with other mundane tasks, too. For example, you can use Home Assistant to help you keep on top of your domestic admin.
Grocy is a popular option. It's a self-hosted groceries and household management app that you can run as a Home Assistant add-on . You can use Grocy for creating and managing shopping lists for groceries, but it can do a lot more than that.
You can use it to keep track of what food you already have in your home, what items are running low, and what you need to add to your shopping list. You can track expiration dates so that you don't discover that half-eaten jar of pickles is now three months out of date, meaning you waste less food.
You can add your favorite recipes and use Grocy to determine which recipes are the best options for using up ingredients that are close to their expiration dates. Once you have your recipes set up, you can add all the ingredients that you don't already have at home to your shopping list with a single click. As well as groceries, you can track chores , tasks, batteries, and more.
Home Assistant makes things even more powerful. You can create automations to send you alerts before food is due to expire, create a dashboard that displays items that are nearing expiration, or even build an ESP32 barcode scanner to add items to your inventory.
Turn your electricity meter into a smart meter
Count the pulses to track usage
Home Assistant's Energy dashboard is a great way to spot trends in how you use energy in your home and hopefully save yourself some money. In order to make the most of it, however, you need to be able to measure your energy usage. If you don't have a smart meter, you're missing the most important information.
There's a clever solution to this problem that can make many older electricity meters smart. Some older meters have LEDs on the front that flash as you use electricity; for example, the LED might flash 1,000 times for every kilowatt-hour of energy that you use. The Home Assistant Glow is a small device that you can build yourself and attach to your meter that will count these pulses and use that to estimate your current power usage and total consumption.
The device was designed for the European market, where pulse LEDs are common. In the US, many meters use infrared pulses rather than an LED. However, some US users have replaced the light sensor with an IR receiver and got things working with a few tweaks to the Home Assistant Glow code.
Once you have it set up, you can pass the data to your Energy dashboard and be able to track your electricity usage over time. It's a great way to spot spikes and identify devices that are using a lot of electricity.
Add parental controls and ad-blocking to all your devices
Use AdGuard Home as your DNS server
As a parent, I spend a lot of time worrying about what my kids will see online. Watching shows such as Adolescence only makes things worse. Plenty of devices offer some form of parental controls, but I wanted something that would work across different devices with different operating systems.
AdGuard Home is a self-hosted DNS server that you can use to block ads and trackers across your local network. When a device on your network wants to access a website, it uses a DNS service to find the IP address for the relevant site. AdGuard Home acts as your DNS server, and when it spots a website trying to contact a known address for an ad server, it blocks the request so that the ad never makes it to your device.
There are other options that can do a similar job, such as Pi-hole . However, AdGuard Home includes some useful parental controls too. You can block domains associated with adult content or turn on SafeSearch for supported search engines such as Google, YouTube, and DuckDuckGo.
Home Assistant exposes toggles for these features, so if you share a tablet with your kids, for example, you can have the parental controls on when your kids are up, and then have them turn off when they've gone to bed so that you can use the device without restrictions.
Through the AdGuard web UI, you can do even more, such as managing blocklists and assigning different settings to different devices. The really clever part is that you can set up Tailscale so that devices route their DNS through AdGuard Home on your local network, meaning that the parental controls can keep working on your kids' devices even if they're away from home.
The best Home Assistant projects aren't always the most impressive
If you want to impress your friends with your state-of-the-art smart home, these projects aren't the things to show them. While they may not have the "wow" factor, they can be incredibly useful, and do what all good smart homes should do: make your life a little easier.
