Home Assistant vs OpenHAB: Which Open-Source Smart Home Platform Fits You? (2026)
Two terminal windows open side by side — Home Assistant vs OpenHAB — both freshly installed on your Proxmox host, cursor blinking. One shows Home Assistant’s onboarding wizard already discovering devices on your network. The other shows OpenHAB’s main UI,...
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Your Smart Home, Your Data — Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi vs. Google & Amazon
🎧 Listen to the 60-Second Audio Recap: The Privacy Problem — What Big Tech Does With Your Smart Home Data Every voice command you send to Google Home or Amazon Alexa leaves your local network, transits a third-party server, and...
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Solar Panels 100% Local: Hoymiles Inverters in Home Assistant with OpenDTU (No Cloud)
Your Solar Data Is Flying to China First — Here’s How to Stop It 🎧 Listen to the 60-Second Audio Recap: The Privacy Problem With the Official Hoymiles DTU This guide covers OpenDTU Hoymiles Home Assistant integration via local MQTT,...
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Ditch the Cloud: Local Control of Your Mitsubishi Heavy Industries AC with ESP32-S3 & ESPHome
🎧 Listen to the 60-Second Audio Recap: This guide covers complete Mitsubishi AC Home Assistant ESPHome local control via ESP32-S3. The official Mitsubishi WF-RAC WiFi dongle works. It pairs quickly, the app is polished, and the integration is seamless. It...
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Pair Your First Zigbee Sensor with Home Assistant ZHA — Keep Your Bathroom Data Off Foreign Servers
🎧 Listen to the 60-Second Audio Recap: What’s Actually Happening With Your Sensor Data Right Now This guide covers how to pair Zigbee sensor Home Assistant ZHA without a vendor hub. A Zigbee humidity sensor costs about $8. The hub...
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USB Passthrough in Proxmox: Connecting Z-Wave & Zigbee Antennas to Home Assistant
This guide covers USB passthrough Proxmox Home Assistant for dual-chip Z-Wave and Zigbee dongles in your HAOS VM, then configuring both ZHA and Z-Wave JS as active, fully local integrations. This guide assumes you already have a running HAOS VM...
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The Ultra-Budget Zigbee Hub: Expanding the AVATTO HA 70 for Under €30
In Part 1 of this series, we proved that the €37 AVATTO HA 70 is a surprisingly capable little Home Assistant server. But a server without devices is just a plastic box sitting in your closet. Today, we are going...
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AVATTO HA 70 Review: The €37 AliExpress Home Assistant Box
In November 2025, I spotted something on AliExpress that seemed too good to be true: the AVATTO Home Assistant Box HA 70, priced at just €37.56. It looks exactly like a generic Android TV box, but the listing claimed it...
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