Smorster

10 Home Assistant add-ons to make it WAY Better!

Smart Home Solver · 14m 36s · Watch on YouTube · 32 sources

Decision Card

Effort: Each item is a 10–30 minute HACS install-and-configure job on an existing Home Assistant instance; adopting the whole list is roughly one afternoon, plus an evening if you restyle dashboards with the theme and card-mod.

Honest take: The video calls all ten “add-ons,” but none are actual Home Assistant Add-ons (supervised Docker apps) — they are HACS custom cards, themes, and integrations, which live in dashboard/frontend internals and break on HA core updates far more often than real add-ons do (kiosk-mode and card-mod both broke on HA 2026.2; the presenter himself hit a Chime TTS + Piper incompatibility and had to work around it).

Concrete next steps:

  • Flightradar24 integration — try if you’d actually look at a flight map; install AlexandrErohin/home-assistant-flightradar24, widen radius to ~5000 m, and add the README’s recorder: exclusion (sensor.flightradar24*) or it bloats your database (~20 min); skip if it’s a novelty you’d check twice.
  • C.A.F.E. flow editor — adopt if you have complex automations; it edits native HA automation YAML visually (FezVrasta/cafe-hass, ~15 min); note the actively developed fork FLODE; skip if your automations are all two-liners.
  • Frosted Glass theme — try; install theme + Theme Manager, use the “light” (no-blur) build on tablets (~20 min); skip if you run low-end wall tablets — the blur rendering is heavy.
  • Firemote card — adopt if you have Apple TV / Fire TV / Shield and use phone dashboards; needs the ADB integration for Android devices (PRProd/HA-Firemote, ~30 min); skip if the physical remote never leaves the couch.
  • Bubble Card — adopt; pop-up subviews declutter any dashboard and it composes with the other cards here (Clooos/Bubble-Card, ~30 min); skip only if you don’t customize dashboards at all.
  • Chime TTS — try if your home makes voice announcements; budget extra time for the known Piper issues (issue #298) — workaround is chime first, then a separate Piper tts.speak; skip if you use no TTS.
  • Team Tracker — try if you follow a team ESPN covers; integration + companion card (vasqued2/ha-teamtracker, ~20 min); skip if you don’t watch sports.
  • Atomic Calendar Revive — adopt for family/kitchen dashboards with Google Calendar (totaldebug/atomic-calendar-revive, ~20 min); skip if you never surface calendars in HA.
  • Music Assistant Player Card — try if you run Music Assistant; install both mass-player-card and the required mass_queue integration or queue/artwork won’t show (~25 min); skip if you don’t use Music Assistant.
  • Card five-pack (Mushroom, card-mod, timer-bar-card, weather-radar-card, kiosk-mode) — adopt Mushroom and kiosk-mode (append ?kiosk to the dashboard URL); try card-mod, timer-bar-card, and weather-radar-card as needed; skip card-mod if you’d rather not maintain CSS that HA updates periodically break.

TL;DR

Smart Home Solver walks through his ten favorite free, open-source Home Assistant community extensions: Flightradar24 flight tracking, the C.A.F.E. visual automation flow editor, the Frosted Glass theme, the Firemote TV-remote card, Bubble Card pop-ups, Chime TTS announcement chimes, Team Tracker live sports scores, Atomic Calendar Revive, the Music Assistant Player Card, and a rapid-fire five-pack of dashboard cards (Mushroom, card-mod, timer-bar-card, weather-radar-card, kiosk-mode). The through-line is dashboard quality-of-life: everything installs from the community ecosystem at no cost, though several items need small config tweaks he calls out from experience.

Key Points

  • All ten picks are free and open source, curated from the hundreds or thousands of community extensions available for Home Assistant. 00:15
  • The Flightradar24 integration puts an overhead-flights map and list on a dashboard and can trigger automations per flight; he raised the radius from 1,000 to 5,000 m, added latitude/longitude to the map URL, and excluded the sensors from the recorder to avoid database bloat. 01:08, 01:33
  • C.A.F.E. gives Node-RED-style visual flow editing on top of existing native Home Assistant automations — no separate automation engine like Homey or Node-RED. 02:41
  • The Frosted Glass theme ships full and light variants; the full version caused rendering issues on his iPad, so he runs the light version, which skips pop-up styling but performs well. 04:27
  • Firemote replicates the physical remote for Apple TV, Google TV, Fire Stick, and Nvidia Shield on a dashboard — replacing a remote card he once built by hand. 05:27
  • Bubble Card is his all-time favorite: instant pop-up panels that hide rarely-used controls (like the flight map) behind a button, dismissed by tapping elsewhere. 06:01
  • Chime TTS plays a notification sound before spoken announcements; it wouldn’t work with Piper (his local TTS), so he plays the chime via Chime TTS and then calls Piper immediately after. 07:56
  • Team Tracker surfaces a game-day card with countdown, live score, and in-game stats, replacing push notifications for sports. 08:56
  • Atomic Calendar Revive renders Google Calendar with an in-progress bar per event and is the reason a Home Assistant dashboard is allowed in his kitchen. 09:28
  • The Music Assistant Player Card needs the companion “queue actions” add-on installed, or album artwork and the queue won’t appear. 11:01
  • Final five-pack: Mushroom cards (missing controls like drop-down selectors), card-mod (per-card CSS), timer-bar-card (visualize timers, e.g. garage light countdown), weather-radar-card, and kiosk-mode (?kiosk in the URL hides header and sidebar). 11:35, 13:22

Notable Quotes

“you can use existing Home Assistant automations and add a flow editor on top of it” — 02:41

“The default calendar dashboard in Home Assistant, it’s garbage. It’s not that good.” — 09:31

“Can I just say that Home Assistant is one of the greatest things ever made?” — 13:37

Verified Claims

  • Claim: The Flightradar24 integration should be excluded from the Home Assistant recorder to avoid filling the database with flight data. 01:33 Sources: AlexandrErohin/home-assistant-flightradar24 README Verdict: Confirmed — the README documents a recorder: exclude: entity_globs: sensor.flightradar24* config to protect storage from write churn.

  • Claim: C.A.F.E. adds a visual flow editor on top of existing, native Home Assistant automations, unlike Node-RED which is a separate system. 02:38 Sources: FezVrasta/cafe-hass README, FLODE fork announcement Verdict: Confirmed — C.A.F.E. transpiles flows to native automation YAML, imports existing automations, and interoperates with the built-in editor; note an actively developed fork (FLODE) now exists.

  • Claim: The Frosted Glass theme includes a theme manager to change background image and accent color, plus full and lighter-weight variants. 04:00 Sources: homeassistant-frosted-glass-themes, frosted-glass-manager Verdict: Confirmed — v1.3 added a UI Theme Manager companion integration, and no-blur builds exist for lower-end devices (matching his iPad performance complaint).

  • Claim: Firemote provides phone remotes for Apple TV, Google TV, Fire Stick, and Nvidia Shield. 05:27 Sources: PRProd/HA-Firemote Verdict: Confirmed — the card supports Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, Chromecast, Homatics, NVIDIA Shield, onn., Roku, Xiaomi Mi, and Android TV (Android devices need the ADB debugging integration, which the video doesn’t mention).

  • Claim: Chime TTS didn’t work with Piper for him, and the workaround is playing the chime first and then calling Piper separately. 07:56 Sources: chime_tts issue #298 (Piper not supported), chime_tts issue #232 (Piper fallback failing) Verdict: Confirmed — multiple open issues report Piper being unselectable or producing no TTS audio through Chime TTS.

  • Claim: Team Tracker pulls your favorite sports team’s schedule, live score, and stats into Home Assistant. 08:37 Sources: vasqued2/ha-teamtracker, vasqued2/ha-teamtracker-card Verdict: Confirmed — the integration uses ESPN scoreboard APIs (pro, NCAA, and international sports) and the companion card renders pre-game countdowns and in-game layouts.

  • Claim: If album artwork or the queue don’t show in the Music Assistant Player Card, you must also install the “music assistant queue actions” add-on. 11:01 Sources: droans/mass-player-card, droans/mass_queue Verdict: Confirmed — the card requires the separate mass_queue custom integration for queue control.

  • Claim: Adding ?kiosk to a dashboard URL (e.g. as a Fully Kiosk Browser start URL) hides the header and sidebar. 13:22 Sources: NemesisRE/kiosk-mode README Verdict: Confirmed — that is the documented behavior; note HA version coupling (v8.0.0+ required for HA 2025.10+, and HA 2026.2 broke several kiosk-mode features).

  • Claim: These ten are “add-ons” for Home Assistant that you install with a button press. 00:10 Sources: fricklr: integrations vs add-ons vs HACS Verdict: Disputed on terminology — in Home Assistant, “Add-ons” are supervised Docker applications; everything in this video is a HACS custom card, theme, or custom integration, which install and fail differently (frontend resources, HA-version coupling).

Tools, Papers & Standards Mentioned

Follow-up Questions

  • How well does C.A.F.E. (or its FLODE fork) handle large existing automation libraries — does round-tripping complex YAML (templates, choose blocks, parallel actions) through the visual editor stay lossless?
  • What is the actual recorder/database growth rate of the Flightradar24 integration near a busy airport, and does the recommended entity_globs exclusion also disable the automation triggers you might want?
  • Given that kiosk-mode and card-mod both broke on HA 2026.2, what is the maintenance cost per HA monthly release of a dashboard stack built on DOM-patching frontend hacks, and are native HA features (sections dashboards, built-in kiosk options) closing the gap?

Sources