When you want to do something in Home Assistant, it can often be a time-consuming process.You can spend a long time configuring devices, building dashboards, or making repairs.Wouldn't it be good if there were some shortcuts you could take to make things a little easier? Turn old IR remotes into Home Assistant controls Put old remotes to use again Home Assistant recently added native support for infrared.
This means that with the right hardware and supported integrations, you can control devices that use infrared remotes directly from Home Assistant.While this is a very welcome addition to Home Assistant, the features are still in their infancy, and capturing, organizing, and using IR commands is a fairly laborious and complex process.That's where HAIR 1.0 can help.
It's a custom component you can install via HACS, which acts as a full management interface for your IR devices.There's a sniffer that you can use to learn commands from your remotes, action mapping that allows you to bind a remote command to a specific action, and the option to create IR-triggered automations that run when any captured signal is received, including unknown commands from random remotes.Currently, receiving commands is only supported via the ESPHome integration, and you need to be running Home Assistant 2026.4 or later.
For the Broadlink, Tuya Local, and SMLIGHT integrations, HAIR can transmit, but can't receive.Once the new InfraredReceiverEntity platform is added to these integrations, they should be able to receive as well as transmit commands directly from HAIR.The beauty of using HAIR is that if you have multiple IR remotes lying around your home, you can use it to add them all from one location, and assign each remote to control different things around your smart home.
Home Assistant Green Dimensions (exterior) 4.41"L x 4.41"W x 1.26"H Weight 12 Ounces Home Assistant Green is a pre-built hub directly from the Home Assistant team.It's a plug-and-play solution that comes with everything you need to set up Home Assistant in your home without needing to install the software yourself. $219 at Amazon Expand Collapse Make a sports scores dashboard Get prepared for the soccer World Cup The soccer World Cup is just around the corner, and the format has been expanded from the usual 32 teams to feature a staggering 48 teams from around the world.In total, 104 matches will be played, which is a lot to keep track of.
Home Assistant can help.You can create a dashboard to keep track of every match across the entire World Cup, and have the scores update in real time as the matches take place.The TeamTracker integration provides real-time scores for a wide range of sports, including basketball, American football, ice hockey, golf, tennis, and, of course, soccer.
As well as soccer scores for national leagues such as the MLS, English Premier League, and Spanish La Liga, the integration also includes score data for the World Cup and Women's World Cup.Getting the live data is one thing, but you still need to be able to display it.Thankfully, there's also a TeamTracker Card that you can use in your dashboards to display the key information for each match.
Whether you only want to add cards for the matches featuring your national team, or you want to add all 104 matches, you can build a dashboard that will update in real time as they take place.When I set my dashboard up, I found a problem.By adding a card for each of the 48 teams, every fixture was duplicated, since the same card was generated for both teams that were playing each other.
I used the following code to remove duplicates based on the event name: {%- set ns = namespace(items=[]) -%} {%- for team in integration_entities("teamtracker") -%} {%- if team.startswith("sensor.wc_") -%} {%- set event_name = state_attr(team, "event_name") if state_attr(team, "event_name") else state_attr(team, "team_abbr") -%} {%- set ns.items = ns.items + [{"team_sensor": team, "event_name": event_name}] -%} {%- endif -%} {%- endfor -%} {%- for team in ns.items | unique(attribute="event_name") -%} {{{"type": "custom:teamtracker-card","entity": team.team_sensor }}}, {%- endfor -%} Clean up broken entity references Lost Entity Finder does the hard work for you Sometimes you need to change an entity ID in Home Assistant.This might be because you moved a sensor or because the old version didn't fit your current naming convention.When you change an entity ID, however, the old ID may still be used in automations, scripts, scenes, dashboards, and YAML files.
Hunting down these lost entities can be a tedious and time-consuming task, and if you miss any, you may find that automations or scripts stop working as you expect.Lost Entity Finder is a custom component you can download from HACS that takes the hard work off your hands.When you change an entity ID, it will find instances throughout Home Assistant where the old ID is being used and raise a repair with direct links to each location.
The beauty is that you can choose to auto-replace all of the old entity IDs in bulk or opt to ignore all the repairs if you prefer.You don't need to worry about ignored repairs being lost forever, either.There's a button that will restore ignored repairs and rescan, so if you need to sort them at a later date, you can hide them and then bring them back again whenever you want.
Like all good tools in Home Assistant, the Lost Entity Finder was built by a user who didn't want to have to manually locate every lost entity themselves.It was then shared with the community so that it might help other Home Assistant users.Isn't that what Home Assistant is all about? Related These Are the 7 Best Ways to Run Home Assistant Find the best hardware for your smart home hub.
Posts 7 By Adam Davidson Others have taken the time, so you don't have to All three of these projects are based around problems that other Home Assistant users have encountered and the solutions that they've built.Whether you want a way to add IR remotes, to keep track of the soccer scores, or just to find missing entities, these tools can help you get the job done quicker.
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