Despite its beginner-friendly UI, Home Assistant offers top-tier automation facilities under the hood. If you’re a smart home enthusiast or a tinkerer with multiple IoT gadgets in your arsenal, HASS is a gold mine for automation projects. But for folks who fall under the casual user umbrella, you can leverage blueprints in your Home Assistant workstation instead of spending hours compiling lines of code just to automate a couple of LEDs.

If you haven’t heard of them, blueprints are community-created scripts that offer convenient menus and toggles to help you create trigger-action sequences for your smart devices. As someone who’s deep into the Home Assistant rabbit hole, here’s a curated list of my favorite HASS blueprints.

5 Frigate notifications

Keeps intruders at bay and amazes my guests

I’ve used several Network Video Recorder tools in the past, but Frigate remains my favorite utility for managing my surveillance cameras. It’s fairly lightweight, has rock-solid tracking support, and works with a plethora of AI accelerators. Plus, it’s easy to integrate a Frigate instance into my Home Assistant server, allowing me to monitor my security cameras from the HASS dashboard.

As if that’s not enough, the Frigate notifications blueprint by SgtBatten lets my NVR setup send alerts to my Home Assistant devices should my cameras pick up anything out of the ordinary. It also has plenty of settings to help me tweak the notifications to my liking. If you want to flex your smart home setup, you could configure the blueprint to send alerts to your smart doorbell before your guests get the chance to ring it.

4 Jellyfin webhook handler

For movie nights

Although Plex and Emby have their perks, Jellyfin is my preferred media server platform by a long shot. After all, it lets me stream my movie and TV show collection without forcing me to shell out extra money for transcoding, webhook support, and other necessary features. It’s also available as an integration on Home Assistant, and I can combine it with the Jellyfin webhook handler blueprint for a wacky yet highly functional smart home control system.

This neat plugin by thenextbutton lets me set up trigger-action chains for my Jellyfin server. This can range from simple tasks like pinging my mobile device when someone accesses my movie collection to cool automation flows that involve pulling down my blinds and shutting all the lights when Jellyfin starts streaming media files.

3 Calendar notifications & actions

The ideal companion to my activity-riddled calendar

If you’ve glanced at my Google Calendar, you’ll find it filled to the brim with projects, tasks, and assignments. That’s mostly because my lizard brain won’t settle down unless I keep it engaged with fun projects and productivity tasks. And the Calendar notifications & actions blueprint by developer Blacky serves as the perfect addition to my Home Assistant space.

While the ability to receive calendar alerts for my upcoming tasks on my HASS dashboard alone makes it worth setting up, the blueprint’s real utility is that it lets me map certain actions to my smart devices for each event. Throw in the Proxmox integration from HACS into the fold, and I can use this blueprint to automate my home lab with my calendar events.

2 Low moisture level detection

To keep my plants nice and healthy

As much as I want to own a kitchen garden, I must admit that I have a hard time watering the small collection of houseplants in my apartment. It’s not just laziness either; sometimes, I get so engrossed in my home lab projects and coding assignments that I end up losing track of time. Moisture trackers for the plants are great and all, but they’re futile if I forget to check them as well.

Enter the low moisture level detection blueprint by cweakland. While it requires me to create a plant card in the Home Assistant dashboard, it can pull the moisture values from my smart sensors and notify me when the plants are starting to dry up. My apartment lacks a sprinkler system, so I can’t make full use of this blueprint. But if you’ve got a large garden, you can even pair it with a smart sprinkler to automate the entire process without getting your hands dirty (pun intended).

1 Motion-activated lights

An automation chain that lights up my path, literally

Despite sounding somewhat rudimentary, the motion-activated lights blueprint by iainsmacleod is a real game-changer for my smart home. True to its name, the blueprint uses motion sensors to confirm my presence before activating or deactivating the LEDs, lamps, and other lighting paraphernalia in my apartment.

Not only that, I can even configure the blueprint to control the lights in accordance with the position of the sun. If you’ve got customizable LEDs, you can use the automation to modify the color, brightness, and other parameters of your lights upon detecting motion.

There’s no shortage of cool HASS blueprints

Considering the popularity of Home Assistant in the tinkering crowd, this article is incomplete if I don’t mention some other useful blueprints. The Holiday & Away Lighting blueprint is perfect for folks worried about intruders while on vacation. That’s because the blueprint can randomly turn on your appliances to deceive curious onlookers into believing you haven’t left your home.

If you’ve got LLMs running in your home lab, you can pair them with the AI-powered Frigate notifications blueprint to get AI-generated descriptions of the camera feed. Then there’s the Synchronize 2 Home Assistant script, which is great for note-takers who want to access their to-do lists from their HASS dashboard.