Published Thursday, October 15, 2026 at 12:29 PM PT

Burbank · Thursday, October 15, 2026 · 12:29 PM · 89°F, 20% humidity, wind 4 mph SE, 29.44 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 2

basnijholt/home-assistant-config is one man’s Home Assistant setup, published as a GitHub repo and rewritten to use the newest features. It has 1,969 stars, 19 open issues, a table of contents that needs its own table of contents, and a badge claiming it runs Home Assistant 2026.10.0. It was last pushed on October 8. My guess is that people have discovered a stranger’s YAML is easier to copy than to write, which I respect and also find a little sad for the rest of us. The repo is labeled JavaScript, which is a mystery I am not solving on a weekday.

The Part Where I Read the README So You Don’t Have To

The good stuff is a sunrise emulator that ramps lights up in the morning, a Spotify wake-up that slowly ramps the volume, and a battery monitor that nags you when a sensor is about to die. There’s an Aqara Magic Cube that controls music and lights, Philips Hue dimmers and Aqara switches that drive the lights, presence detection built from binary template sensors, and an automatic converter that turns Lovelace’s JSON dashboards into version-controlled YAML. Then there’s the stuff that exists purely for the author’s enjoyment: a MacBook Touch Bar integration, an iMac menu bar app that controls speakers, and a section on Apple Watch control. The Touch Bar is a museum piece now, since Apple killed it in 2021 and my Mac Studio never had one. I’m reviewing the one feature in this repo that lives in the Smithsonian.

The repo is also a configuration dump for a single flat in Europe, complete with a device table priced in euros and a “guide for my girlfriend” that I’m not going to examine further. The “Ideas?” section lists a Bunq banking API integration in a home automation repo, which is scope creep wearing a cardigan. Nobody needs their light switches to know their account balance, Bas.

Where It Would Actually Touch My House

Home Assistant is the brain here, which means anything Bas built in it is at least potentially local, and that is the only reason this repo gets a second look. I run 33 Hue lights on a dedicated bridge, and a sunrise ramp that eases brightness and color temperature over twenty minutes is exactly the kind of thing that makes my lights look like they have a personality, which is more than I can say for most of the people in this house. The catch is that Bas implements it as an AppDaemon app, which is a second Python runtime with its own config file and its own opinions about restarts. If I want the ramp, I’ll rebuild it as a native Home Assistant automation using Hue transition times and skip the extra moving part.

The Aqara pieces are more interesting, because my garage W100 climate sensor and the rest of my Zigbee mesh already speak the same language. The Magic Cube and the Aqara switch mappings are Zigbee events that land in Home Assistant over the local radio, with no bridge cloud in the loop. Copying the button-to-action mapping from a blueprint is a twenty-minute job with a clipboard and mild swearing. Nothing in the excerpt I can see suggests a vendor account is required for any of this, which is the minimum bar for not getting docked.

A low-battery warning belongs on the notification bus, which means it should land in telemetry.events and get routed to Slack and Discord the same way every other alert in this house does. I don’t need Bas’s version of it. I need the idea, which is “watch every battery entity, fire once when it crosses a threshold, and do not spam me every five minutes like a smoke detector with a grudge.” I’d build it in an afternoon and feed it into the bus I already run. The presence template sensors are also worth a look for the room-level occupancy layer, since my cameras handle the front door and the backyard but can’t tell me whether anyone is hunched over a laptop in the den. Bas’s binary_sensors.yaml is a clean reference for combining motion, door, and media signals into a room-presence boolean.

The Catch

Its problem is the same one every personal config has: it’s wired to one house, one set of devices, and one author’s brain. The TP-Link HS switches in the device table are the kind of hardware I’d be happy to never see again, because the stack that comes with them likes to want an account before it lets you turn anything on. The iOS theme and the Apple Watch controls depend on the Home Assistant companion app, which pushes notifications through Apple’s servers. That is an Apple cloud, not Bas’s cloud, but it’s still a cloud, and I don’t get to pretend it isn’t just because the lights come on locally.

There’s also the matter of 19 open issues on a config repo, which tells you that even a man with 100+ documented automations still has a backlog. Little Mister has a backlog of “quick” requests that would make Bas weep into his YAML. I’m not sure whose problem is bigger.

Verdict

STEAL. I’m taking the battery monitor concept and wiring it into my notification bus, rebuilding the sunrise ramp as a native Home Assistant automation on the Hue lights, lifting the Aqara button mappings for the Zigbee mesh, and borrowing the presence template pattern for the room occupancy layer. I’m not adopting the repo, because a snapshot of someone else’s house is a bad foundation for mine. I’m not installing the Touch Bar, the Bunq idea, or the TP-Link switches, and I’m not running AppDaemon just to get a fade-in. Bas published a working config, shared it with strangers, and survived the experience. That’s more courage than the rest of this house has shown. Credit where it’s due, and then back to my own YAML, which is slightly better, and I’ll say that to exactly nobody.

Scouted repo: basnijholt/home-assistant-config — 1969 stars. Verdict: STEAL. Desk review, nothing was flashed or installed.