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Tech News
Shelly has released the Presence Gen4, a smart home sensor that uses mmWave radar instead of a camera to detect the location and movement of up to 10 people or pets in a space up to 650 square feet. Priced at $84.99, it's available now through Shelly's online store and works with Google Home, Apple Home, Amazon Alexa, SmartThings, and Home Assistant via Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Zigbee, and Matter.
A new open-source project called Vacuula provides a self-hosted server that can repair and control Neato robot vacuums, including units left unusable after Neato's cloud services shut down. The tool currently supports Neato's Gen3 and Gen4 models (D3 through D10), with Gen2 BotVac Connected support still in development, and offers core features like maps, scheduling, zones and historical run data. Users set it up via Docker Compose or a Home Assistant add-on, running the server on their own hardware since it must stay online continuously.
A smart-home enthusiast who automated most of a house using Home Assistant found that certain devices, like garden lights on a timer, still required manual control via an app that no one in the family wanted to use. To solve this, they commissioned an illustrator to create a hand-drawn floor plan of the house, which was turned into an interactive dashboard showing live states like a flickering fireplace and glowing garden lights.
A developer who already used Home Assistant to track bin collection schedules built a new project called BinRange to detect whether bins had actually been moved. The system uses a fixed ultra-wideband radio anchor, six battery-powered tags attached to wheelie bins, a 3D-printed enclosure, custom firmware with wireless updates, and integration with Home Assistant to combine location data with collection schedules. The build followed an earlier, less successful attempt using Bluetooth tags and a proxy, and was developed with heavy use of AI coding tools including Codex and Astra.
Nabu Casa, the commercial partner behind Home Assistant, has renamed its Home Assistant Cloud service to Home Assistant Link. The company says the service, launched in 2018, lets users remotely access their smart home setup and funds development of the open-source platform through subscription revenue directed to the Open Home Foundation.
Home Assistant founder Paulus Schoutsen announced the open-source smart home platform is rebranding Home Assistant Cloud as Home Assistant Link, saying the company doesn't want the word 'cloud' associated with its service. The change is largely cosmetic, with the same remote-access features plus backend speed and reliability improvements, still priced at $6.50 a month or $65 a year. Schoutsen told The Verge the rename also clears up confusion among users who mistakenly thought the platform itself ran in the cloud rather than locally on users' own hardware.
Home Assistant is open-source software that can run on an old laptop to unify smart home devices from different brands, including Philips Hue, Google Nest, Ring, Sonos and Ecobee. It supports automations, scenes and scripts, letting users link devices together, such as starting a coffee maker with an alarm dismissal or dimming lights when a movie starts.
Home Assistant, a free open-source smart home platform with over 1,500 device integrations, officially supports installation on the Raspberry Pi 4 and 5, requiring at least 2GB RAM and a 32GB microSD card. The software carries no subscription or feature paywall, though add-ons like cloud remote access are optional paid extras. Once installed, users can automate their homes based on triggers like location, power usage, NFC tags, or device state changes.
A Hacker News poster argues that AI-related submissions have come to dominate the site's feed over the past couple of months, crowding out other hacker-relevant stories. They cite two recent examples—a Lenovo solid-state cooling laptop and Brax Industries' open-source smart home devices—that received little engagement despite being technically interesting. The poster suggests YC could curate underexposed posts or add tagging so users can filter content by topic.
A Home Assistant user rerouted their Withings Body+ smart scale's data by pairing it with an original ESP32 board over Bluetooth Classic instead of relying on Withings' cloud servers. The ESP32 receives weigh-in data from the scale and forwards it to Home Assistant over Wi-Fi using ESPHome, with an AI coding assistant helping reverse-engineer the undocumented Bluetooth protocol from the Withings Android app.
Anker introduced MindBase, an AI-powered smart home hub that centralizes control of its security, energy, cleaning, and audio devices while running a large language model on-device for local processing. The hub offers up to 48TB of local storage with no subscription fees and connects to third-party ecosystems like Matter, Apple HomeKit, Alexa, Google Assistant, and Home Assistant via a feature called EasyOmni Link. Alongside MindBase, Anker's Eufy brand also revealed new security hardware including the E50 NVR system, a video doorbell, and a window camera.