Botmonster Tech

Wire a Shelly 1 relay in parallel with your existing garage door opener’s wall button, attach a reed switch for open/closed state detection, and integrate both with Home Assistant . That is the whole project. You get remote control, auto-close timers, arrival-based opening, and departure-based closing for under $20 in hardware, without replacing your existing opener or voiding any warranties.

This approach works because nearly every residential garage door opener - Chamberlain, LiftMaster, Genie, Craftsman - uses the same basic control mechanism. The wall button shorts two low-voltage wires together, and the motor responds. The Shelly relay replicates that button press electronically. Your physical wall button keeps working; the relay just adds a second way to trigger the same circuit.

The Home Assistant Energy Dashboard shows you where your power comes from, where it goes, and what it costs. If you have solar panels and a battery, it’s the best way to track output, storage cycles, grid flow, and per-device use, all without your inverter maker’s cloud app.

Setup takes care, though. The dashboard wants specific sensor types with specific attributes. Get those wrong and you get blank graphs or wildly wrong numbers. Below: the sensor rules, how to wire up popular inverter and battery brands, the dashboard setup itself, and some custom sensors for deeper insight into your solar setup.

AppDaemon 4.5.14 is a Python runtime that runs next to Home Assistant . It lets you write rules as full Python classes. You get state machines, scheduling, outside API calls, and logic that YAML can’t handle. Install it as a Home Assistant add-on, drop a Python file in the apps folder, define a class that inherits from hass.Hass, and use callbacks like listen_state() and run_daily() to drive multi-step flows, saved values, and live data.

You can build a personalized Linux live USB image with your own packages, desktop, config files, and branding. Two tools cover this. Debian’s live-build runs on the command line and builds repeatable ISOs from config files, so it fits CI pipelines well. Cubic , the Custom Ubuntu ISO Creator, does the reverse: a GUI that opens an existing ISO, drops you into a chroot, then rebuilds it. Both make bootable ISOs you can flash with Ventoy , dd, or Balena Etcher .

Yes, you can watch and control your 3D printer from anywhere. Just connect OctoPrint or Moonraker to Home Assistant . Both print servers expose APIs that Home Assistant can poll for live data: print progress, temperatures, camera feeds, and error states. From there you can build dashboards, fire phone alerts when a print ends, spot failures with AI camera checks, and cut power to a runaway printer through a smart plug. Setup takes about an hour once your print server runs on a Raspberry Pi. The result: a 3D printer that acts like any other smart device.

That old Android phone in your drawer is a full sensor platform. It packs a camera, microphone, light sensor, barometer, accelerometer, proximity sensor, and a touchscreen, all on your WiFi. So don’t recycle it. You can turn it into a motion-detecting security camera, a room sensor that posts data over MQTT, or a wall-mounted Home Assistant dashboard. That dashboard rivals commercial smart displays costing $150 or more. The whole setup runs on free software, keeps your data local, and takes about an hour.