6 weird and wonderful Home Assistant integrations that are actually useful

Home Assistant can integrate with practically everything, but most of the time, when we say "everything", really, we're usually talking about the countless brands making smart home devices. However, thanks to the massive community behind it, you really can integrate with just about everything. It's not just your smart lights, random sensors, and router that can be added to Home Assistant; it's a lot more, too.

I've been using Home Assistant and integrating more and more with my smart home. These are some of the most interesting, weird, and wonderful integrations I've discovered that I actually use, and maybe you'll like some of them, too. These integrations assume that you have HACS installed.

6 CS:GO game state listener

Make your entire room react to the game

If you play Counter-Strike, the CS:GO game state listener is a fantastic integration that you can set up. Despite the name, it's also updated for Counter-Strike 2, and can poll your client for information about the game. Counter-Strike has a "game state" functionality that allows tools to pull data from your game through a standard API, which is what enables peripherals like those from SteelSeries to display information from your currently ongoing game.

It can pull information like:

• Game freeze state
• Round start
• Bomb planted
• Bomb exploded
• Game ended
• Player flashed
• Health low
• Health critical
• Round winner

These can then be used to change the condition of devices around you. For example, if you're low on health, a light could change color to red, and you could flash your lights when a round is won. It's silly, but it's fun, and it can be a cool way to integrate a game into your smart home. Just make sure to follow the instructions carefully when setting it up, as it requires you to create a game state configuration file.

5 HA Satellite Tracker

Track where the ISS is

If you want to track satellites going above your home, the HA Satellite Tracker, using the N2YO API, is perfect. It'll pick up on the satellites whizzing overhead, and you can add individual trackers to get alerts for when a satellite will go overhead and be within visual range. For example, in the above picture, you can see that I'm tracking the International Space Station. When you set it up with your N2YO API key, it'll pull your default Home Assistant longitude and latitude.

For space nerds, this is a must-have. It's really cool, and you can track quite a few satellites. All satellites are identified by their NORAD number, and N2YO's API page has information on how to find the satellite number of any that you'd wish to track.

4 GoXLR Utility

Control lights and more

If you have a GoXLR audio interface, the GoXLR Home Assistant integration is a little-known yet fantastic piece of software to utilize in your smart home setup. It exposes pretty much every control on your audio interface to Home Assistant, allowing you to automate audio levels, muting, and more. If you also don't use all of your interface's faders, you can use the spare ones to control aspects of your smart home.

For example, I've linked up my GoXLR to Home Assistant and use my fourth fader, which defaults to "Samples", to control the brightness of the light in my office. It works perfectly, and means that I have an easy to use slider on my desk to turn up or down my light brightness, giving me fine control over the brightness level.

3 Pollen trackers

Stay one step ahead of hayfever

Hayfever getting to you? There are pollen trackers that you can configure to alert you when pollen levels are expected to be particularly high. I'm using a European-based one, called "SILAM Pollen", but the Kleenex Pollen Tracker Home Assistant integration will also work for those in the United States, the United Kingdom, and a small number of European countries.

You can pair this with notifications for high pollen periods so that you can be aware of it, or take pre-emptive action to prepare yourself. For some people, hayfever can be quite bad, and this particular integration can help those people keep on top of things.

2 Avanza Stock

If you want to keep an eye on your stocks and shares, the Avanza Stock Home Assistant integration makes it easy. This one needs to be configured from your configuration files rather than via the UI, but it's really easy to do. For example, the above Nvidia example required the following under a sensor key in my configuration:

- platform: avanza_stock
stock:
- id: 4478
name: Nvidia
shares: 1
purchase_price: 50

To get the ID, simply head over to the Avanza site and look up the name of the stocks you want to track. The ID you need will be in the URL, and you can name it whatever you'd like. Some people have used this to build stock dashboards inside of Home Assistant, and it gives you a lot of tools to do exactly that. If you enter a purchase price as well, you'll get stats like your percentage gain or loss.

1 Presence Simulation

Nobody will know you're away

When you're away, it's not uncommon to either use smart lights to simulate activity in the home or to have someone call over and show some kind of presence just to deter burglars. However, as criminals become more sophisticated, smart lights turning on and off at specified intervals could be caught on to, which is why the Presence Simulation Home Assistant integration is fantastic.

Presence Simulation goes a bit further; it tracks how you use your devices, and then when you're away, it can continue activating and deactivating those devices in a way similar to how you normally would have. It does this by analyzing the state history of devices, and you can control many different aspects of how it runs and controls devices.