ArtHome — Home Intelligence Layer

ArtHome is the brain of my living space — a fully self-hosted Home Assistant instance running on my ArtLab homelab. It processes data from 1500+ entities across 33 domains, orchestrates 27 automations, and presents everything through 3 dashboards spanning 20 views and 300+ cards.

Architecture

ArtHome runs as a Home Assistant OS instance on the Beelink EQR6, exposed through a Cloudflare Tunnel for secure remote access. All local traffic stays inside a Tailscale mesh VPN — no open ports, no exposed attack surface.

Add-on Ecosystem

The instance runs 11 add-ons that extend core capabilities:

HACS & Custom Integrations

Beyond built-in integrations, 52 HACS repositories extend the platform. Notable ones include:

Integrations — Alarmo (advanced alarm panel with presence-based arming), LLM Vision (AI-powered camera analysis with open-weight models), Better Thermostat (adaptive TRV control with external temperature sensors), Bubble Card Tools (backend for the Bubble Card UI system), Beszel API (homelab metric ingestion).

User Interface — Bubble Card (minimalist card collection with pop-up touch interactions), button-card (swiss-army-knife custom card), auto-entities (dynamic entity list auto-population), Big Slider Card (expanded light intensity sliders), Alarmo Card (security panel frontend).

Themes — ArtLab Theme (cross-platform theme blending Vitesse clarity with Catppuccin palettes, used across all ArtHome dashboards).

Dashboards

ArtHome ships with 3 dashboards, each serving a distinct purpose.

Home Dashboard

The primary control center with 20 views and 300+ Lovelace cards organized into three tiers:

Overview & Monitoring — The landing Home view aggregates everything on one screen: presence (who is home), weather forecast, next calendar events, active media, alarm state, energy consumption, and quick-access lights toggles. A daylight calendar card shows sunrise/sunset progression.

Security — The Sécurité view centers on the Alarmo card with arm/disarm controls, an LLM Vision camera feed with AI analysis timeline, and a logbook of recent events.

Lighting — The Lumières view groups lights by room, with scene selectors (living room: 6 scenes, bedroom: 4 scenes) and individual brightness/color controls via Mushroom and Tile cards.

Environment — Dedicated views for Weather (Météo-France forecasts, precipitation radar, wind), Climate (thermostat status, indoor temperature trends), Batteries (low-battery device monitoring), Energy (power consumption tracking).

Media & Comfort — Média aggregates media players (Apple TV, Sonos, Panasonic TV, PS5) with conditional cards that show controls only for active devices. Separate views for Ventilation (fan control), Volets (shutter positions), Aspirateur (vacuum robot).

Room-by-Room — Individual views for Salon, Chambre, Cuisine, Couloir, Salle de Bain, Jardin, Garage, and Entrée — each showing the room's lights, sensors, and relevant controls on tile cards.

Infrastructure — The Homelab view is the largest, with 158 cards monitoring server health: CPU/RAM/Disk gauges across all nodes (Beelink, NAS, Docker containers), network status, service uptime, and storage pool utilization.

Map Dashboard

A full-screen device tracking map showing real-time locations of household members and mobile devices. Uses Catppuccin theme.

Kiosk Dashboard

An Immich photo frame displayed on a wall-mounted tablet. Shows a curated album with the UI hidden, cycling through family photos as a living digital canvas.

Automation Layer

Lighting & Scenes

A Hue Dimmer Switch paired via Zigbee2MQTT controls the living room through multi-press actions — short press steps brightness, long press maxes out, down-press fades off with a 2-second transition, and the off-button cycles through 6 scenes (Classique, PSG, Atlético, Football, Cinéma, Deep Coding). The bedroom has 4 scenes (Classique, Red, Blue, Fire).

When the Apple TV starts playing, Home Assistant detects the playing state and transitions the living room to the Cinema scene with a 5-second fade. Pausing restores Classic; stopping resets both the scene and selector.

A Sleep Mode toggle per room overrides active scenes by forcing all lights to deep red at 10% brightness with a 5-minute crossfade. Any light turned on during sleep mode inherits the constraint automatically.

Presence & Security

When both residents leave, all lights dim off over 2 seconds. If nobody is home and the alarm is disarmed, a departure reminder notification is sent. Arriving home while the alarm is armed triggers a security dashboard shortcut.

If nobody has been home for 24 hours and guest mode is off, vacation mode activates automatically — notifying both residents. It disables on first return.

The Alarmo alarm panel triggers a full-house red light strobe (500ms intervals) on intrusion, then restores white lighting when cleared.

Daily Briefing

Every morning at 8:30 AM, the system fetches events from calendar sources and pending tasks from todo lists, then pushes a structured notification to the iPhone. A full-formatted email follows with detailed scheduling, due tasks, and a personal sign-off.

At 8:00 AM, a weather check runs. If rain is predicted, a motorcycle rain alert notification is pushed with estimated precipitation.

Work Tracking

The system tracks daily hours at Polytechnique: after 8 hours, Arthur receives a "time to go home" notification (workdays only, once per day — flag resets at midnight). When Arthur leaves campus between 15:00 and 22:00, Nerea is notified automatically.

Media & Arrival Context

When Arthur arrives home while music is playing on his iPhone and nobody else is present, an interactive notification offers to transfer playback to the Sonos speaker via Music Assistant with a 5-minute timeout. Daily Immich photo memories are pushed as notifications.

Infrastructure Safeguards

• Bandwidth management — qBittorrent speed limits toggle automatically based on active media streaming clients
• AdGuard auto-recovery — filtering and protection re-enable after 2 hours if manually disabled

Devices & Connectivity

ArtHome proves that a completely local, privacy-first smart home can rival any cloud-dependent system in capability. Every trigger is a learned pattern, every action a removal of friction.