Home Assistant – Bus Stop Times

September 1, 2025 | Comment

As I have stated in previous posts I am currently trying to get my head around Home Assistant and Dashboards in particular. I am slowly working up to having a dashboard display on an old Android tablet.

I decided that I’d like a project that could show how Home Assistant could be used for more than simply turning on and off the lights, and what would be useful to me would be a display showing a list of the next bus arrivals at our nearest stop.

I found that our local bus company, Reading Buses, has an api that provides … Read the rest

Adding a New Card to a Home Assistant Dashboard

August 21, 2025 | 1 comment

Now that my Home Assistant devices are set up and working reasonably well, my focus has moved to building out a dashboard that has the elements that I want to see rather than everything that is shown on the Overview tab.

This post takes you through the steps to create a new dashboard and populate it with two different types of cards.

Create a New Dashboard

If you try to edit the existing default dashboard you will be presented with the following message – basically you cannot mess with the default dashboard and so you have to create your own.… Read the rest

Not all Zigbees are created equal

August 15, 2025 | Comment

I said in a previous post that I had been getting into Home Assistant/automation and you should expect more posts – and here is the first!

Baby Steps

My introduction to home automation was, like many others I suspect, via the IKEA TRÅDFRI range of blubs and plugs. In order for these to work you needed a hub which joined them all together and allowed you to control them via an app. These devices all worked over the Zigbee protocol and worked well. Then, IKEA took the decision to discontinue the TRÅDFRI range and replace them new devices using the … Read the rest

What’s the Difference Between Matter and Thread?

July 27, 2025 | 1 comment

I’ve recently been getting into home automation and Home Assistant in particular (expect more posts on that as I get my head around it).

Words that frequently come up when dealing with home automation devices are Zigbee, Thread and Matter. I was familiar with Zigbee but was confused about Thread and Matter and how they worked together so I asked my friend ChatGPT to explain. I found it useful so decided to tidy it up and post it here.

What are Thread and Matter?

Thread and Matter are two of the latest smart home standards, often mentioned together, … Read the rest