Alternatives
Products that do what Connecting my dumb garage and car's homelink buttons to Home Assistant does
Hi all, I've been on parental leave and while working on my garage door, I thought to myself... it would be great to open up this garage door from my phone without having to buy a bunch of expensive stuff. That snowballed into, I want the garage door buttons on my car's rear view mirror to trigger automations in home assistant. I went down a bit of a hardware rabbit hole and wrote a little writeup of my journey and a how-to. It's my first piece of public technical writing so I'm open to any feedback!
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Hey HN! Nick here – developer of Itsyhome, a menu bar app for macOS that gives you control over your whole HomeKit fleet (and very soon Home Assistant). I run 130+ HomeKit devices at home and the Home app was too heavy for quick adjustments. Full HomeKit support, favourites, hidden items, device groups, pinning of rooms/accessories/groups as separate menu bar items, iCloud sync – all in a native experience and tiny package. Open source (https://github.com/nickustinov/itsyhome-macos) and free to use (there is an optional one-time purchase for a Pro version which…
Feb 2026 · itsyhome.app
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Found that you can actually run a 35B Qwen model on a Pi with very impressive intelligence and stability. Built connectors for car ODB to read all about car internals, and manufacturer's cloud service for stuff like changing AC or opening/ locking doors. Gave it info such as the full car manual. And then hooked it up with my other agents in our discussion room! So now it can answer car questions such as "when should I add oil and what kind of oil?" and help you fully offline, and when online talk with the agent family that includes all the most powerful models so they know how the car…
12d ago · github.com
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I am not sure if this is fits the HN community, but I am posting it here if people are interested. This is the current iteration of the car: http://i.imgur.com/ko8YBh.jpg Details: I wrote a simple android app that streams the accelerometer data from the phone to the pi over a simple socket. The pi then uses this data to drive the DC motor and the servo motor. Tilting the phone to control the car feels very natural. In this[0] pic you can see the wifi dongle I've used. I am using Adafruit Occidental v0.2[1] as my OS because it has support for my wifi dongle. It also makes some hardware…
2012
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Howdy, gang; After almost two weeks of sitting in Apple's approval queue, my new app Timebar is finally available. I think it has a pretty innovative UI feature, so I wanted to float it by Hacker News. It's a timer app that turns your Mac's menu bar into a sort of virtual hourglass. Your menu bar starts out tinted blue (or whatever colour you pick) and it slowly drains from right-to-left until your time is up. It works very well for situations where you want to keep track of time, but don't need to be super precise. The menu bar is easy to glance up at, and it doesn't take long to happen…
2013
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