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Turn a Roku Into a Home Assistant Dashboard with Raven
See how a custom Roku app and Home Assistant turn idle TV time into a household dashboard, with the regular remote ready when…
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Carlo Costanzo · 25+ years in technology
Longtime VMware vExpert honoree
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Fresh from the workbench
Turn a Roku Into a Home Assistant Dashboard with Raven
See how a custom Roku app and Home Assistant turn idle TV time into a household dashboard, with the regular remote ready when it's time to watch.
Stop Getting Blinded by Your Smart Lights at Night
Set a gentler brightness for any dimmable light that turns on at night, without maintaining a light list. A complete Home Assistant package and a short YAML walkthrough.
Turn a Samsung TV Into a Home Assistant Dashboard with Haven
Our living room Samsung TV becomes a Home Assistant kiosk when the Roku screensaver starts. Here is how Haven, passive camera views, and shared household notifications fit together.
Give an Old Nest Thermostat a New Job as a Home Assistant Display
My retired Gen 2 Nest now cycles through family photos, shows Home Assistant alerts for two minutes, and follows our bedtime, away and guest states.
Smarter garbage reminders with Frigate and Home Assistant
Use separate local Frigate classifiers to see which garbage and recycling bins still need moving, then narrow and stop the existing Home Assistant reminders.
Local Holiday Countdowns in Home Assistant with Python and Codex
Replace Wolfram Alpha holiday lookups with local Python calculations while keeping Home Assistant countdown sensors, personalized speech, and seasonal lighting.
Local Package Detection with Frigate and Home Assistant
Replace cloud LLM Vision package checks with local Frigate state classification. Keep your Home Assistant helpers and alerts, and let Codex help train the model on your own…
Cloudflare Webhooks Are Free: Website Alerts in Home Assistant
Bring Cloudflare certificate, tunnel, and origin alerts into Home Assistant with authenticated webhooks, persistent Repairs, and verified recovery.
Add Custom Icons to Home Assistant iOS Notifications
Give Home Assistant iPhone alerts colored icons for packages, driveway cars, and vacuum help. Copy the nested YAML fields or use shared notification presets.
The person behind the projects
Hi, I’m Carlo.
I’m a senior virtualization consultant, longtime VMware vExpert honoree, and the person behind vCloudInfo and the Bear Stone Smart Home. I share what I learn so you can build on it.
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