3 unnecessary but awesome Home Assistant projects to try this weekend (Aug 7 - 9)

Published Aug 7, 2026, 10:15 AM EDT Adam has a degree in Engineering and has a life-long interest in technology. He has been writing for over a decade for various print and online publications, with a focus on consumer tech. He joined How-To Geek in 2024 while working at Pocket-lint. As well as being a long-term fan of Apple products, he also has a strong interest in smart home tech, running a Home Assistant server at home to automate all his smart home devices. He believes that the ideal smart home should work with minimal interaction from the user, with automations running as if by magic rather than requiring you to push buttons on a control panel. You can find more of his work on Muck Rack. Some Home Assistant projects serve a clear purpose and offer a tangible benefit. There are plenty of other projects that aren't strictly necessary but are still worth doing simply because they're insanely cool. If you're looking for a project that's more fun than functional, then you're in the right place. It frees up space while also being awesome Credit: Patrick Campanale / How-To Geek This is a project I've been wanting to do for a long time. The main thing that's holding me back is that I don't have easily accessible power in the location where I'd want to set it up, so it will take more time than I have to spare at the moment. If you have a more suitable location, however, then you may be able to get it done in a weekend. My robot vacuum cleaner is one of the most useful smart home devices I own. It takes over a mundane job and does it for me. With an automation that runs the robot vacuum once everyone has left the house, I rarely even see the robot in action. The one problem is that there isn't an ideal spot to place the charging dock. We have it under an armchair, but the robot regularly pushes it out of position, and then fails to charge properly. One totally unnecessary but very awesome solution is to build an automatic garage for the robot vacuum. You can use a linear actuator to raise and lower a panel at the base of your kitchen units and set up the charging base behind this panel. When it's time to clean, the panel raises, and the robot emerges. When it's time to charge, the robot returns home, and the panel closes behind it. Project a Home Assistant dashboard onto your kitchen surfaces Who needs wall-mounted tablets? A lot of people have a wall-mounted dashboard for Home Assistant set up in the kitchen, as it tends to be one of the main hubs of the household. A tablet stuck to your wall is fine, but it's not nearly as cool as a dashboard that's projected onto the surface of your kitchen units. That's exactly what one Home Assistant user has done. Using a small Android-powered DLP projector mounted to a light fixture, it's possible to project a smart home dashboard onto the flat surface of a kitchen cabinet. As long as the surface is relatively pale and uncluttered, you can get a reasonably clear image with the right projector, even in daylight. There are plenty of ways you can use this dashboard in your kitchen. You can play shows or movies while you're cooking, play a video of a recipe that you can pause and resume using voice commands, display multiple countdown timers, and more. When you're not cooking, the dashboard can display typical smart home information, act as an information hub for your family, or simply display the time. When you don't need the dashboard, you can turn off the projector, and it will disappear, which can't be said of wall-mounted dashboards. The fact that the project is called the HOLODECK only adds to how awesome it is. Make your smart home react to the state of your board game Your gaming can become even more immersive Credit: Daniel Dönigus The specific project where I first came across this idea is pretty niche. A Home Assistant user was a fan of the board game Frosthaven, and wanted a way to use Home Assistant to make the game more immersive. One of the components of the game is an elemental board that tracks the states of six different elements, each of which can have one of three possible states. The original game uses a simple board with counters to track these elements, but some enterprising players have designed 3D-printed trackers that allow you to slide the element markers back and forth between their different states. Using an ESP32 connected to 12 reed switches, the Home Assistant user was able to track the positions of these element markers and share this information with Home Assistant through ESPHome. Home Assistant then adapts the lighting and sound to match the element states. For example, the Fire element causes the lights to flicker orange and the sound of a gently burning fire to play. The Earth element causes nature sounds to play while the lights give a soft green glow. All of this is only useful if you play that one specific board game, but the concept is applicable more broadly. As long as you can figure out a way to pass the game state to Home Assistant, you can use that information to trigger whatever scenes or commands you want. Sometimes, pointless projects are the best You don't need to build a garage for your robot vacuum or make your smart home react to your board game. These aren't essential projects, but that's no reason not to set them up; sometimes a project is worth doing just for the wow factor.