Home Assistant Custom Integrations
Building open source solutions that extend Home Assistant’s capabilities and enhance the smart home experience. These custom integrations solve real-world problems for thousands of users, from hyperlocal weather detection to utility monitoring and smart automation management.
Open Source Smart Home Development
Home Assistant represents the best of open source technology—a powerful, privacy-focused platform that puts users in control of their smart homes. Contributing to this ecosystem means helping build a future where smart home technology is accessible, private, and not locked into corporate ecosystems. Each integration I develop focuses on solving genuine problems that improve daily life while maintaining the open source principles of transparency, community collaboration, and user empowerment.
These aren’t simple proof-of-concept projects. They’re production-ready integrations used by real people in their homes every day. Each one includes comprehensive documentation, automated testing, proper error handling, and active maintenance. They follow Home Assistant’s architectural patterns and best practices, ensuring they work reliably and integrate seamlessly with the broader ecosystem. Distribution through HACS (Home Assistant Community Store) makes installation straightforward for users while maintaining quality standards through code review and semantic versioning.
The development approach prioritizes quality over features. Rather than building integrations that attempt to do everything, each project solves one problem exceptionally well. This focused philosophy results in more reliable, maintainable code that users can trust. When issues arise, they receive responsive support with genuine attempts at resolution. The goal isn’t just creating useful tools—it’s fostering a community where knowledge is shared, problems are solved collaboratively, and everyone benefits from collective effort.
Featured Integrations
Micro Weather Station
Hyperlocal weather detection using your own sensors
Traditional weather services report conditions from stations miles away, often failing to reflect your actual microclimate. Micro Weather Station transforms your existing outdoor sensors into an intelligent weather detection system using sophisticated meteorological algorithms. It analyzes temperature, humidity, pressure, wind, and solar radiation data to determine what’s actually happening at your property, providing accurate hyperlocal conditions and intelligent five-day forecasting based on real atmospheric science.
Learn More About Micro Weather Station →
San Francisco Water Power Sewer (SFPUC)
Automated water usage monitoring for San Francisco residents
For San Francisco residents served by SFPUC, understanding water consumption typically requires manually logging into the utility portal. This integration automates the entire process, fetching detailed historical water usage data at multiple resolutions and presenting it directly in Home Assistant’s Energy dashboard. All data processing happens locally for privacy, with intelligent historical fetching, automatic backfilling for missing data, and seamless credential management through Home Assistant’s repair system.
Learn More About SFPUC Integration →
Controllable
Virtual switches with sync tracking for conflict-free automation
One of Home Assistant’s most frustrating problems occurs when automations conflict with manual control—an automation turns on a light, you manually turn it off, and it immediately turns it back on. Controllable solves this by creating sync-aware virtual switches that track whether manual overrides have occurred. Automations can check the is_synced attribute before running, allowing them to respect manual control instead of fighting it. The event-driven architecture detects changes instantly with zero performance overhead.
Learn More About Controllable →
Development Philosophy
Solving Real Problems
Every integration addresses a genuine need experienced by real users. Micro Weather Station emerged from the frustration of inaccurate weather data for specific locations. SFPUC Integration was born from the tedium of manually checking water usage. Controllable solves the universal problem of automation conflicts. These aren’t academic exercises—they’re practical solutions that improve daily life for people using Home Assistant.
Quality and Reliability
Production use demands reliability. Each integration includes comprehensive error handling that gracefully recovers from failures, extensive logging for troubleshooting when issues arise, automated testing to catch regressions before release, and proper documentation so users understand both how to use features and what to do when problems occur. Code quality is maintained through linting, type checking, and adherence to Home Assistant’s architectural patterns. The goal is software that works reliably, day after day, without constant maintenance or intervention.
Community Collaboration
Open source thrives on community involvement. All projects welcome contributions through bug reports, feature requests, code submissions, documentation improvements, and translation additions. Issues receive responsive attention with genuine attempts at resolution. Development is transparent through GitHub with clear changelogs, semantic versioning, and organized releases. The aim is fostering a collaborative environment where everyone benefits from collective knowledge and shared problem-solving.
Privacy and Local Control
Home Assistant’s core philosophy emphasizes local control and privacy, and these integrations honor that commitment. All data processing happens on your Home Assistant instance. Credentials are encrypted and stored securely. No external services receive your data. The SFPUC integration scrapes data directly from the utility portal and stores it locally. Micro Weather Station analyzes your sensor data on your hardware. Controllable manages automation logic entirely within Home Assistant. Your smart home data remains under your control, always.
Technical Approach
Modern Python Development
All integrations are written in modern Python with type hints for better code clarity and IDE support, async/await patterns for responsive performance, comprehensive error handling that fails gracefully, and adherence to PEP 8 style guidelines. Code is formatted with Black and organized for readability. Dependencies are minimal and well-justified. This professional approach ensures code is maintainable not just for the original author, but for anyone in the community who wants to understand or contribute.
Home Assistant Best Practices
Deep familiarity with Home Assistant’s architecture enables proper integration. Projects use data coordinators for efficient update management, implement config flows for user-friendly setup, properly handle lifecycle events and state restoration, support the repairs system for user-friendly error resolution, and follow entity and device registry patterns. This isn’t just making things work—it’s making things work the Home Assistant way, ensuring seamless integration with the platform’s ecosystem and future compatibility as Home Assistant evolves.
Statistics and Long-Term Data
Several integrations involve sophisticated data management beyond simple sensor states. They implement proper statistics insertion with correct metadata, handle multi-resolution data storage for flexibility, support long-term retention without database bloat, and enable Energy dashboard integration. This statistics expertise allows powerful long-term tracking and analysis features that go beyond what simple sensor history provides.
HACS Distribution
All integrations distribute through HACS, the de facto standard for custom integrations. This provides users with simple installation and automatic updates, version management through GitHub releases, community visibility and discoverability, and standardized quality expectations. Proper HACS configuration includes validated manifest files, semantic versioning, and clear release notes. This distribution method balances ease of use for end users with developer control over code quality and release timing.
Future Development
The smart home ecosystem constantly evolves, presenting new opportunities for useful integrations. Future projects might explore additional utility monitoring for gas, electricity, or other resources, advanced automation helpers that solve common pain points, data visualization tools that make trends more accessible, or protocol implementations for devices lacking official support. The focus remains consistent: solving real problems that improve the smart home experience through quality open source software.
Ideas for new integrations often come from community discussions and personal experience. If you have suggestions for useful integrations or problems that need solutions, GitHub Discussions and issue trackers provide channels for collaboration. The best projects emerge from understanding genuine user needs and applying technical expertise to address them effectively.
Contributing to Home Assistant
Beyond these custom integrations, contributing to the Home Assistant ecosystem takes many forms. This includes code contributions to the core platform, documentation improvements for existing integrations, community support answering questions on forums and Discord, bug reports that help identify and resolve issues, and translations that make Home Assistant accessible worldwide. The community thrives because people at all skill levels find ways to contribute their expertise and time.
For those interested in integration development, the path forward starts with identifying a problem worth solving, studying Home Assistant’s architecture documentation, examining existing integrations to understand patterns, and starting small with simple functionality before adding complexity. The Home Assistant developer community is welcoming to newcomers who ask questions, follow guidelines, and demonstrate genuine interest in improving the platform.
Get Started
Ready to enhance your Home Assistant installation with these integrations? Each project includes comprehensive documentation covering installation, configuration, and troubleshooting. HACS makes installation straightforward—just search for the integration name and click install.
For Users:
- Install through HACS for the easiest experience
- Check documentation for setup and configuration details
- Report issues on GitHub if something isn’t working right
- Share your use cases and automation ideas
For Developers:
- Fork repositories and explore the codebase
- Review open issues for contribution opportunities
- Follow development guidelines in CONTRIBUTING.md
- Join discussions about features and architecture