HACS is built in now — and my hand-installs were invisible
Home Assistant 2026.11 leaves nothing of HACS to install. What changes, what breaks in templates, and why manually installed integrations do not show up.
Topic
Getting started and running it
First install, names, updates, migrations. The parts no guide covers.
18 articles
Two identical buttons, and "long" means different things
One button at the door, one in the bedroom. Both identical, both with three gestures — and the most important gesture does something entirely different on each.
An umlaut killed my frost warning
Three faults ran unnoticed for months, one of them in a protection function. All three were found in one evening — and two earlier findings had to be retracted.
A guessed wait is not a check
The lock needs 38 seconds; my automation waited 20. The second command hit the motor mid-travel — and took the confirmation down with it.
The SD card is out — a day spent at the wrong end
Long-term statistics wiped twice, four corrupt database files. Moving to an NVMe cost a day, two bugs in other software and two wrong theories of my own.
The UPS shuts nothing down — and that is deliberate
Every guide says: shut down cleanly on power failure. Mine keeps the Pi running. The reason lies in a property no UPS puts in its datasheet.
The sticker does not know who is there — the calendar does
The request was an e-ink display with a rotating QR code. What was built is a sticker with no power. Why that answers the same question better.
The name lives in three places, and you see only one
Locally no device has the name it has in the account, the firmware stores no umlauts — and the display hid the house power because of a setting in the cloud.
Three cities, three data sources, one question: when do I leave?
Departure boards in Merano, Kapfenberg and Vienna. The same idea built three times — and three times I got it wrong in a different place.
400 Bad Request, and my config had never been active
Remote access answered with 400 and nothing else. Three suspects cleared — until it turned out Home Assistant no longer reads that file at all.
The model with more physics was the worse one
Four years of gas use reconstructed from 71 meter readings. My temperature model was physically sound — and off by 110 cubic metres.
Two masters on the same light
The Hue bridge automates by itself, even when Home Assistant is off. Use the same sensor twice and you will later wonder why the light goes out on its own.
Kapfenberg was standing in one day
The third installation was the fastest — not because I had got better, but because the first two were written down. Plus one measurement with no occasion.
Vienna: three integrations in one day, and a dead file
The second installation was the first to profit from the first. And on the same morning it wrote a configuration that never had any effect.
The calendar knows in advance, the phone knows now
No tracker can predict an arrival, no calendar can safeguard a departure. Why both are needed — and where the eight and ten hours come from.
Both came home — and the automation said nothing
Unlocking the door was supposed to produce a photo. None appeared. The trigger was waiting for a state change this lock never makes.
Merano was the first — with nobody to look things up in
The first of the three installations. Two things came out of it that saved time later — one of them was a quotation mark.
The Raspberry Pi sat in a drawer for eleven months
Bought in September 2025, nothing achieved for a year. What changed after that was not the hardware — and the reorder date gives away the day.