6 Home Assistant integrations I use to make my smart home smarter

Home Assistant is a must-have for any home lab enthusiast. It enables you to automate every aspect of your smart home and can integrate with so many services that you’d never have even thought of. Once you pair it with various sensors in your smart home, the real fun begins, as you can then automate services based on real-world conditions.

I’ve been using Home Assistant for quite a while now, and these are some must-have integrations that I personally use to make my smart home even smarter. While there are custom add-ons you can install in Home Assistant, none of these require you to install HACS and are available through the integration browser in Home Assistant.

We’re also going to skip the likes of Philips Hue, IKEA Tradfri, Tuya, and other typical smart home integrations, as this list assumes that you are already using those and are looking for tools that can actually improve your smart home rather than connect it in the first place.

6

Jellyfin

Set the mood automatically

First up on the list is Jellyfin, and the uses for this particular integration may not seem obvious at first. It will keep track of how many clients are streaming at once and will expose when certain devices are streaming at a given time. After thinking about it, I realized that there are some pretty cool uses for this that I’ve since set up in my home.

Imagine you’re on the couch, and you decide to watch a movie in the evening. You probably don’t want the lights on (or at least not full blast), right? That’s where Home Assistant comes in. You can create an automation that automatically dims specific lights (or turns them off completely) when it’s past a certain time and your Jellyfin client is streaming on a specific device. Home Assistant can also control what’s playing and can see details of what you’re watching, so you can create an automation based on specific TV shows or movies, too.

You can do other things that are just like this. When you start playing something, Home Assistant can mute certain devices, turn off other devices, or even put your phone on do not disturb. You could then have everything return to normal after you’ve finished watching, fully automating your movie setup. Some TVs can even integrate with Home Assistant, so you could take it a step further and have your speakers switch on whenever your TV is switched on.

5

Spotify

Control your music and even automate it

If you want to control your Spotify from Home Assistant, there’s an incredible integration that gives you complete control. You can show your currently playing music on the dashboard and control what media is playing as well, and you can automate certain playlists to play at specific times or have other devices react based on your Spotify status.

There’s a little bit of setup required with this; you’ll need to create a Spotify API key, but the integration will tell you how to do that when you first install it. If you use Spotify a lot and also use Home Assistant, this is an integration you genuinely won’t want to miss. It’s especially nice just to centralize controls in my home, as I pretty much always have music playing throughout the day.

4

AccuWeather

All of the weather details that matter, right in Home Assistant

AccuWeather is one of the best and most popular Home Assistant integrations out there, and with good reason. Its free API is good enough to track the current weather, and it can provide information on details like the temperature, humidity, and precipitation levels. I created an automation using the Fitbit integration (more on that later) that checks if I’ve woken up. When I wake up, it then pushes a notification to my phone with the weather forecast for the day and the highest expected temperature.

AccuWeather is a go-to Home Assistant integration, and you’re doing yourself a disservice if you’re not using it. It’s free, it has loads of information, and you can create automations based on it to keep track of the weather in your location. You could automate this further to turn on an air conditioner if the heat gets too high, for example. I’ve added badges to the top of my dashboard with the current weather conditions and temperature, and it plays a vital part in my smart home.

3

MQTT

Great for Zigbee devices

If you have Zigbee sensors in your home, then you’ve probably heard of Zigbee2MQTT, also known as Z2M. While the Zigbee Home Automation (ZHA) integration works, you’ll have a much better time using Zigbee2MQTT and then using the MQTT integration in Home Assistant to pull that data.

My exact setup is that I use Zigbee2MQTT in TrueNAS, which passes data to an Eclipse Mosquito MQTT database, and then the Home Assistant MQTT integration reads from this database. You get access to all of the same sensors as you get with ZHA, but you have more control over every sensor. Plus, Z2M has better compatibility. For example, the Sonoff sensors that I use for temperature and humidity didn’t work very well in ZHA, but they work perfectly fine in Z2M.

If you’re looking to get into Zigbee networks, then MQTT is a must-have integration. I started with ZHA and found it finicky at best, but Z2M, with this integration, made everything work perfectly.

2

Google Calendar

Automate your meetings

I’ve recently configured Google Calendar in Home Assistant, and there’s a lot of automation you can do with just that integration. For example, let’s say you work from home, and you want to make it obvious to others you may live with that you’re in a meeting. You could set up a light connected to Home Assistant that pulses red whenever you’re in a meeting according to Google Calendar so that others know not to disturb you. You can also parse the data that Google Calendar collects.

Piggybacking off of the automation I created to notify me of the weather, I also created an automation to alert me what time my first meeting is during the day when I wake up. This helps me keep on top of my meetings so that I can plan around them, and this helps keep me organized. The beauty of Home Assistant is that you can make anything connected to it react based on an event that happens in an entirely unrelated service, and the Google Calendar integration grants you a lot of potential ways to do that.

For example, I have my robot vacuum cleaner linked to Home Assistant. I could theoretically automate it so that when I add an event with friends at my home to my calendar, it will automatically run that morning before they come over. You could also build a schedule for your robot vacuum cleaner into your calendar, and the same goes for any other smart devices that you link to Home Assistant.

1

Fitbit

Automate your wake-up routine

If you use a Fitbit-powered smartwatch (I use the Google Pixel Watch 2), you can track a lot of your data through Home Assistant with this integration. It can pick up all of your personal health metrics, calories burned and calories consumed, sleep statistics, and more. It’s quite comprehensive, and it’s worth setting up.

In my case, Home Assistant tracks my sleep state and can start certain processes based on when I wake up. I have notifications set to fire when I wake up, and you could integrate this further to automate wake-up routines. These might include turning on a light, a kettle, or anything else.

For example, let’s say your kettle is plugged into a smart plug. You could turn off the kettle using the smart plug and fill it with water when you go to bed, but flick the switch on the kettle to the on position. Then, when your Home Assistant detects that you’ve woken up, it can turn on the kettle (which is already in the on position) and immediately start boiling hot water for you. This interconnecting of services is very difficult to pull off without Home Asisstant, but integrations like these make it easy.

A smart home can always be smarter

If you think your smart home is smart, always remember you can always make it smarter. There are always unique and creative ways to automate various processes, especially when you mix data from other sources. That’s why Home Assistant is so powerful and why you should set it up if you haven’t already. You can automate everything, and with hundreds of integrations (and hundreds more via third-party community stores like HACS), there’s very little it can’t do.