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.

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.

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.

Mount an ESP32-C3 Super Mini with a reed switch on the mailbox door (or a VL53L0X time-of-flight distance sensor inside the box), flash it with ESPHome 2026.3, and wire it into Home Assistant - you will get instant push notifications on your phone the moment mail lands. The total parts cost sits under $15, and deep sleep keeps the whole thing alive for months on a single 18650 cell.