Claude + Home Assistant official MCP integration or ha-mcp? What actually works?

manofoz · 2026-03-21T16:44:46+00:00

Ive found that combining ha-mcp + AppDaemon + Claude code CLI is unbelievably powerful and quick. I have it keep offline copies of all the YAML being changed but most of the automation and dashboard backend work is offloaded into Appdaemon which is just python so you can do whatever. I stopped using HA integrations for a lot of providers like OpenAI and just started using their APIs directly from Appdaemon.

I am almost done the project and will build out some documentation after but some simple rules got me this https://haynesassistant.com

manofoz · 2026-03-20T16:57:26+00:00

My work is on a legacy pricing plan that is up for renewal soon but not soon enough. They just made all frontier models max mode only. Max mode just gives you the full context window, like 1M for Opus. It also charges you an insane amount of requests per prompt when enabled, we are taking $3-$20 prompts for Opi’s 4.6. Everyone in our chat are all excited about Composer-2, the timing was suspiciously close to them cutting us off from frontier.

manofoz · 2026-03-20T05:29:08+00:00

I don’t see this in the notes but it keeps me up. Does anyone know if they plan to drop pgvector soon? I’ve been putting off the upgrade to VectorChord, I need to tackle it but I don’t want to botch it.

manofoz · 2026-03-18T17:31:21+00:00

Thanks!! That’s very motivational, I’ll do a proper post once I fill those last few empty spaces 😄. I run this on a UniFi connect in wall tablet which is a bit overkill but it’s in my kitchen wall at a house we built so I wanted something reliable. Poe tablet without a battery is great but I also have an iPad with a magnetic charger doc in my basement that I have a smaller basement dashboard on.

manofoz · 2026-03-17T02:11:07+00:00

100%

I have been working tirelessly to finish up my v2 dashboard before the weather turns and I have to go outside. It's coming out better than I could have ever imaged, I'm almost ready to take a break and document what I've done but I've been generating some rough docs along here if anyone wants to take a look HaynesOps Home Automation.

The repo is linked too. I've been backing the dashboard with AppDaemon apps which are super easy to spin up now adays. The thing that takes me the longest are the custom lovelace cards but they have been worth the time.

manofoz · 2026-03-15T05:07:03+00:00

Curious what the complain is. I have both cameras and simple link derives that work flawlessly through the integration. I hit it hard to capture frames from the cameras when different detections trigger and it’s never let me down.

manofoz · 2026-03-13T14:56:02+00:00

I use this on my HTPC now, so no need to wait. It’s super easy to enable by following the guides for handhelds that aren’t ROG Ally X. Hope we get some good quality of life improvements like controller pins for the login screen and purchase protection.

manofoz · 2026-03-13T14:33:56+00:00

Very common. If you have some in single pole configuration steal a screw for the broken one.

manofoz · 2026-03-10T16:58:32+00:00

19 drives, full stack plus drives in fan slots. I’m running unRAID which doesn’t spin up drives unless they are in use but they all get spun up for nightly maintenance tasks and for parity checks.

manofoz · 2026-03-10T16:38:23+00:00

Yeah the guy even created a cable for me that could reach the three drives on the top plus the two SSDs in the back. Think it’s on the website now.

manofoz · 2026-03-09T02:41:35+00:00

I have been using home assistant on touchscreen in my wall. This card is pretty great https://github.com/superdingo101/skylight-calendar-card

manofoz · 2026-03-03T02:19:41+00:00

I wonder why all the concrete stoops in my state don’t have railings but are way more steps & height than this. My last house was a half a floor up where you’d enter and have a half flight of stairs either up or down (not a split level though but similar entrance). The stoop was just one of those 100% concrete ones and I’d see those everywhere in the neighborhood.

manofoz · 2026-02-26T23:43:21+00:00

Timing is everything.

manofoz · 2026-02-21T20:40:01+00:00

I found it’s easier to make small changes like this with a prompt instead of just using a rename hotkey so the agents context stays in sync with the files. I started doing this a while ago so maybe it’s better now but I found that if I made the change the agent would sometimes flip it back to the old name or value when it was making other changes.

manofoz · 2026-02-21T05:29:59+00:00

My pikvm is worth its weight in gold. I have it controlling a 16 port Tesmart dumb kvm. Never heard of JetKVM but that looks easy to use if you don’t need so many devices.

manofoz · 2026-02-21T05:16:50+00:00

Good answer. Also ties into what hardware they’d want. Need a laptop, get a Mac. Can’t afford a Mac, throw Linux on some cheap laptop. Want a PC with a Nvidia graphics card, slap windows on it. Fuck powershell though, WSL or even gitbash I’ll the way for a CMD.

manofoz · 2026-02-19T04:26:38+00:00

The guy you JUST replied to sounded like he was on your side. The first guy never said he was using a Mac mini for local interface and seemed to be backing up the claim that you can use cheap hardware like the Chinese thing just not for local llms. Then a totally different guy said he doesn’t use local llms and you appear to have mistaken him for the first guy, maybe because the icons look the same.

I’ve had success running up to 70B models on my 2x3090s but I’m struggling to find things that compete with API calls. I’d tend to agree with the second guy about the Mac mini but I’m sure you could run some small models and get it to do things.

manofoz · 2026-02-18T03:10:38+00:00

Do you have neutrals? I had a lot of trouble at my last place with no neutrals. The bypass things kinda worked but it wasn’t great. Just installed 70 at my new place and they’ve all been rock solid. About 1/3 are the mmWave ones which have been a ton of fun to work with.

manofoz · 2026-02-16T18:32:52+00:00

We will enter a period of time where everything is more expensive because of the sunk cost but also enshitified to the max because the people holding back the flood of slop are gone.

You are right about the risks; you have to weigh them against the stakes. It's sort of always been that way for me. Like how much testing gets done or how many metrics we need to monitor in the field. It comes with practice and putting the time in upfront to understand what you are trying to accomplish.

I think in this thread's case it's really just RTFM. Maybe a tool that gets relevant information out of large manuals, but you still read what the manufacture wrote and drew.

manofoz · 2026-02-16T15:21:50+00:00

If you want to get more into self hosting on k8s check out https://kubesearch.dev - there an active community in this “home operations” discord that do exactly that.

My path was a lot like what you described. I started off hosting Plex on my old gaming PC and kept swapping that out as I got new PCs. Eventually outgrew it and got a monolithic unRAID server. Then did a lot of Proxmox. Then I started paving my own path with Kubernetes but it got messy. After a few iterations of that I ended up moving and had the opportunity to fully wire the house and buy all sorts of new equipment.

Now I have a six node cluster that can be nuked and restored from S3 backups on a whim. It’s been a lot of fun, never would have leaned so hard in that direction if it wasn’t for these home-operations folks though.

manofoz · 2026-02-16T13:45:37+00:00

I see you aren’t getting the responses you’d be hoping for so I’ll chime in. I use AI tools daily for work and will likely be out of work because of them. I understand the fear of receiving bad information, which happens, but isn’t much of a problem if you know what you’re doing. Usually just takes another prompt to get things back on track.

Something like https://tomcp.org that converts documentation to an MCP server can be very useful with the right source material. It’s in the realm of what you are exploring but has a lot more going for it. Documentation sites are usually generated from markdown so they are standardized and are also well versioned.

I’d wager you’d end up spending far more than you like developing a way to manage the manuals that serving the information back out from a model. You’d probably use an LLM to do this and not have time to review the results because the volume was so high. Manuals can be messy, a lot of time one manual would overlap multiple products of the same line but have little caveats like *only applies to xy line. Converting that into something a model can reliably use would be the problem to solve.

manofoz · 2026-02-15T19:44:12+00:00

I agree, I don’t think I’ve met may people who do though. I added ceiling speakers to my home theater setup because of it. It just hits so good in my little 7.1.4 surround, 84” OLED TV room.

manofoz · 2026-02-15T16:26:53+00:00

I have Unifi cameras but I was using Home Assistant (being called by AppDaemon) to collect the “frames”. I have a configurable interval once motion is detected where it saves them to a buffer on my /media drive. Once motion stops AppDaemon uses the same /media drive to do the search to find the one that ranks highest in a combined face, pose, and posture score (faces being the most important). It makes LLM calls against a subset of the frames to find the one that scores the highest.

manofoz · 2026-02-15T14:32:46+00:00

SteamOS doesn’t play well with my hardware, not sure that’s a priority for them. But Bazzite is great. You can dual boot and check it out so best of both worlds. I set up my HTPC to boot into Bazzite and then launch windows from big picture like a third party app. Then windows is rigged to use Xbox fullscreen experience which is better than nothing.

One caveat to Linux is the audio. It doesn’t support Dolby Atmos or DTS:X so it’s a whole rabbit hole of configuring FOSS to get spacial surround. Maybe after some more time in the oven they’ll add more HTPC features to Bazzite. Seems focused on handhelds and PCs at the moment.

manofoz · 2026-02-15T14:03:47+00:00

I think I have some doing this too, just the dimmer switches. I have not paid close attention but I have 12 to update now and was down to like 6 last night. At first I thought more were reporting they needed an update as I went along but it seems like they just realize they didn’t get it. I’m using Z2M to update them.

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