Home Assistant is hands-down the best management hub for smart devices and IoT paraphernalia, and there are plenty of tools that can extend its usefulness even further. From add-ons and integrations for obscure smart home gadgets to HACS packages that let you bring in Proxmox dashboards, presence simulation, and other wacky features to your Home Assistant server, there are tons of services you can combine with your HASS instance.

Node-RED is one such utility you’ll find on the Add-on Store, and having tinkered with it extensively over the last couple of weeks, it has become my favorite add-on for Home Assistant. It’s essentially an automation utility that offers robust flow-based programming support. While it has a steep learning curve, Node-RED’s automation support blows Home Assistant’s trigger-action model out of the water when you want to design complex workflows.

In fact, here are five smart home projects that benefited tremendously after I made the switch to Node-RED’s automation-heavy interface.

5 Blinds management

With specific conditions for each day of the week

If you’re a night owl who hates being woken up by sunlight as much as I do, motorized blinds are the most underrated investment for your living space. Besides saving you the hassle of manually rolling and unrolling your blinds, most blinds/shades can be integrated into Home Assistant, allowing you to automatically control them from HASS' neat dashboard. But why stop there?

With Node-RED, you can create a workflow that sets different conditions for your blinds depending on the day of the week. Heck, you can even sync your blinds' angle with the sun’s position by building a sundial with your favorite microcontroller.

4 Thermostat control

Weather-detection logic makes it even better

Smart thermostats offer a convenient way to control the temperature of your living space. Since you can calibrate these convenient devices remotely, you also get the added advantage of reduced energy bills. While Home Assistant can help you monitor and control them from a unified interface, you can pair them with a Node-RED container to take your smart home to the next level.

Since most thermostats feature dedicated sensors for recording the room temperature, you can create a Node-RED workflow that dynamically modifies the thermostat’s settings by pulling the ambient temperatures – and with a little bit of elbow grease, you can create custom profiles for every room!

3 Advanced lighting automations

Perfect for my erratic sleep cycle

Smart lights, LED lamps, and regular old bulbs hooked up to microcontrollers are often the first devices every DIY enthusiast pairs with Home Assistant as a beginner. After all, they’re easier to configure than Roombas, 3D printers, and other complex gizmos, and can be automated with simple trigger-action commands.

As a gremlin who loves creating overkill setups, experimenting with my smart lighting workflows on Node-RED has become my favorite hobby as of late. Configuring my lights to power on the moment my surveillance camera detects motion is not only convenient when I need to dive into my storeroom at the dead of the night, but also serves as a great party trick when I invite someone over to my nerd cave.

2 Smart locking system

That notifies me if it's left unlocked for too long

If you’ve read my articles on SSO servers, VPNs, and password managers, you may be aware that I’m very particular about securing my home server – and I have a similar attitude towards the rest of my living space. Besides my Frigate-powered surveillance system, I also use smart locks to add an extra layer of security to the rat’s nest I call my home lab.

While most smart locks can send notifications and ping you every time they’re unlocked, you can use Node-RED flows to trigger alerts based on custom conditions. For example, I’ve configured my workflow to send repeated notifications if the door’s left unlocked for more than a minute.

1 Home lab automations

Pair it with presence detection logic for the best results

From Terraform configurations and Ansible playbooks to regular snapshots with Proxmox Backup Server, I love automating every aspect of my home lab. But after figuring out a way to add my Proxmox workstation to HASS last month, I decided to take this wacky project idea – controlling my home lab via Node-RED flows.

With a little bit of searching, I came across the node-red-contrib-proxmox module, which lets me use the PVE API to control all my virtual guests using a couple of Node-RED scripts. I’ve yet to push this module to its full capabilities, but a home lab that automatically powers on as soon as I step into the room is definitely on my bingo card.

Sky’s the limit with Node-RED

If these automation projects didn’t satisfy you, I’ve got a couple of other wild ideas. While I don’t have a kitchen garden in my apartment, I’ve seen tinkerers create automated watering systems using nothing more than a couple of sprinklers, some microcontrollers, and a Node-RED server. Likewise, a jukebox that plays blood-curdling screams the moment an unsuspecting soul opens the door seems like the perfect prank for Halloween, and I'm particularly interested in building an overkill surveillance system using Node-RED, Gotify, and Frigate.