We live in an increasingly digital world, but as Olivia Newton-John said, sometimes you just need to get physical. Here are three projects that let you interact with Home Assistant in a physical way.
An ESP32 barcode scanner makes life easier
Credit: Adam Davidson / How-To Geek
Home Assistant is not just able to help you control your smart home. It can be useful in many different aspects of your life. I use Home Assistant to help with everything from reminding me to take my medication to gamifying chores for my kids.
Home Assistant can also help make the mundane things a little easier, such as grocery shopping. Having to figure out what to buy each week feels like a never-ending nightmare, but there’s a clever Home Assistant project that can make things a little easier.
The BeepBasket project lets you build a system for scanning the barcodes from real products and automatically adding those products to your Home Assistant shopping list. It uses an R35C-B barcode scanner hooked up to an ESP32 that can transfer the data to Home Assistant.
BeepBasket then looks up the product using the Open Food Facts API and adds the item to your shopping list. If the product isn’t found, the barcode itself is added to your list instead. There’s even a dedicated BeepBasket card for keeping track of products through a Home Assistant dashboard.
The idea is that you place your scanner next to your trash can. When you finish a product and throw away the wrapper, you scan the barcode and the product is automatically added to your shopping list. It’s one less thing to think about.
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Let Home Assistant press the buttons on your car keys
An ESP32 can control a car that wouldn’t otherwise integrate with Home Assistant
Credit: Adam Davidson / How-To Geek
Many modern cars offer smart features that let you control things remotely via an app, such as unlocking the doors and turning on the heated seats. Home Assistant offers integrations such as the Tesla Fleet integration that allow you to perform these actions through Home Assistant.
Not every car has these smart features, and not every car that does can integrate with Home Assistant. One user came up with an alternative solution for giving Home Assistant some measure of remote control over their car without the need for apps or APIs.
The user took a spare key fob for the car, opened it up, and wired its button contacts to an ESP32. Home Assistant is then able to send commands to the ESP32 that activate the different buttons on the key fob. The battery was removed, so that the fob is only powered by the ESP32 when a command is received, reducing the risk of a relay attack.
Obviously, you’re limited to what your key fob can do, but the user was able to set up an automation that automatically locked their car at 9:30 PM. If anyone is detected in their driveway between 12:30 AM and 5:30 AM, Home Assistant triggers a different button, which causes the lights to flash and the horn to beep.
This project comes with significant risks, since an error in your automation or a problem with Home Assistant could leave your car unlocked and vulnerable. It’s worth taking precautions to ensure that any similar projects consider these risks.
Turn Home Assistant data into a moving analog needle
See your data the old-school way
Home Assistant can display data on dashboards in a wide range of different ways, from simple numbers to dials or charts. The data is usually displayed on a digital screen such as a wall-mounted tablet, but one Home Assistant user wanted to create something more physical.
The project involved creating a physical needle display built around an ESP32 and an X27.168 stepper motor. The ESP32 retrieves the data from Home Assistant, and the stepper motor moves a physical needle to a specific position related to the value it is trying to display. There are even addressable LEDs built in to show different colors depending on the values.
One example of the gauge in action shows the user turning down their heating. The needle turns counterclockwise to a lower position, and the LEDs change from red to blue. The whole thing is built into a laser-cut acrylic enclosure, which looks awesome.
The user shared a prototype on Reddit and got some very useful feedback from the community. They are now selling ready-made gauges that are hand-built by the user. There’s nothing to stop you from building something of your own using a similar concept.
Sometimes we all need to get physical
While Home Assistant is highly digital, there are plenty of ways you can make it more analog, from using physical knobs to turning your lights on by snapping your fingers. It’s worth exploring what’s possible beyond the same old dashboards.