Yes, you can monitor every houseplant in your home for under $10 per plant. A single ESP32 board running ESPHome (currently at version 2026.3.0) reads capacitive soil moisture sensors, a BH1750 light sensor, and an AHT20 temperature/humidity sensor, then feeds everything straight into Home Assistant . From there, automations send you a notification when a plant needs water, dashboards show moisture trends over weeks, and you stop guessing whether that fern in the corner is actually happy. This guide covers sensor selection, wiring a 4-plant monitoring hub, the complete ESPHome YAML configuration, Home Assistant dashboards, and tips for long-term reliability.

Pool and hot tub chemistry can swing from safe to damaging in a few hours. A paper strip you dip once a week will not catch it. The fix is cheap: a waterproof ESPHome sensor built around an ESP32 , reading water temperature, pH, and ORP, piped into Home Assistant for pump schedules, chemical alerts, and cover reminders. A full setup runs under $80. It replaces guesswork with a live dashboard and push alerts that fire before your heater corrodes.

Drop a few ESP32 boards ($3-8 each) flashed with ESPHome ’s Bluetooth Proxy firmware into rooms where BLE devices drop out. Home Assistant then routes Bluetooth traffic through the nearest proxy on its own. Each proxy adds about 10-15 meters of BLE coverage through interior walls, needs only a USB power cable, and works with HA’s native Bluetooth setup. The BLE devices themselves need no config changes. They have no idea they’re talking through a relay.

Yes, you can build a full smart video doorbell for under $25. The parts list: an ESP32-CAM board, a PIR motion sensor, a push button, and ESPHome firmware. It streams MJPEG video to Home Assistant , pushes a snapshot to your phone on button press, and saves motion clips locally. No cloud. No video leaves your network. The build takes about two hours, and every future update flashes over Wi-Fi.

Connect a free 17track.net account to Home Assistant and you can pull tracking data from 3,200+ carriers into one place. From there, automations ping your phone, fire the porch camera, and toggle outdoor lights as boxes move through the system. Below is a working blueprint for the whole flow, from setup to multi-user alert tuning.

Setting Up the 17TRACK Integration

17track.net is a tracking aggregator. It pulls status updates from USPS, UPS, FedEx, DHL, Royal Mail, China Post, YunExpress, and roughly 3,200 other carriers across 220 countries. Once you add tracking numbers to your 17track account (by hand, through the mobile app, or via email forwarding), the Home Assistant integration mirrors them as sensor entities. You can then display them and build automations on top.

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.