Community Highlights: 2nd edition February 7, 2020 six minutes reading time

Thank god, its Friday! For most of us, it means we can tinker with our Home Automation projects again 😃

The second edition of the Community Highlights is here to provide you a fresh source of inspiration this weekend. And, if that is not enough, upgrading to the latest release of Home Assistant Core 0.105 is definitely a recommendation for your list. It introduces tons of new shiny features for you to play with.

So, what changes did you make to your Home Assistant setup this week?

DIY Smart Candles

For starters, if you are looking for a cool DIY project, 3ATIVE shared a YouTube tutorial on how to make sweet little smart candles that work with Home Assistant.

The code for this project is shared on GitHub: Smart-Candles.

Thanks balloob, for submitting this suggestion 👍

Vanlife: Home Assistant on the Road

Creative use of Home Assistant; we’ve seen quite a few vehicles in the past being fitted with Home Assistant (including boats). Zane Claes (aka Technically Wizardry), shares his story on building a vanlife van with a touch of home automation magic.

In the past few months on the road, he built out a Home Assistant installation that’s geared to work in a car/vehicle. A full blog post explains how he integrated with On-Board Diagnostics (OBD) to read out the status of the van, implemented a dash camera (that doubles as a security camera), temperature sensors and the monitoring cellular internet usage.

You can read Zane’s full blog post here:

https://www.technicallywizardry.com/iot-cars-vans-home-automation/

He also made his Home Assistant configuration publicly available on GitHub.

Thanks, Robbie Trencheny & cgtobi for sending in this item in! 👍

An auto-generating Lovelace UI theme

Dwain Scheeren shared a preview of his Lovelace theme on the Home Assistant Community Forum. The cool think about this theme, is that it automatically generates itself!

Unfortunately, the source code for this isn’t available yet, however, Dwain wrote on the forums that he is planning on releasing it soon. We are looking forward to that, Dwain!

You can follow the development of this theme on the dedicated topic for it on our Community Forum.

Visualizing everything in Grafana

Ivana Huckova had a Hack Day at Grafana (the company she works for) and decided to work on her home to visualize everything (in Grafana, of course).

Today is a Hack Day 👩‍💻 at Grafana and I have decided to hack our home 🏠. I am going to be setting up @home_assistant, exporting metrics to @PrometheusIO and visualising everything in @grafana. Everything is going to be running at @Raspberry_Pi. Follow my progress.❤️ — Ivana Huckova (@ivanahuckova) February 7, 2020

Click on the tweet above to see the full thread of all tweets she did that day.

Oh, Ivana? Did you know we have Grafana available as an add-on? You can find it in the Home Assistant add-on store.

Got a tip for the next edition?

Have you seen (or made) something awesome, interesting, unique, amazing, inspirational, unusual or funny, using Home Assistant?

Click here to send us your Community Highlight suggestion.

Also, don’t forget to share your creations with us via Social Media:

Twitter it! Be sure to mention @home_assistant

Share it on our Facebook group

Post it to our subreddit

Tag @homeasssistant on Instagram

Or via chat, drop us a line in the #lounge at Discord

See you next edition!