Markus Haack // Software Engineer

Two years ago, I built a wooden notepad box with a 2.9-inch E-Ink display and wrote about it.

At Adobe Summit 2026 in Las Vegas, Chris Millar and I ran a 90-minute hands-on lab Vibe Code an Author Experience for Edge Delivery Services, session L613.

Updated May 2026: Added full coverage of Hourly Weather Card and Weather Forecast Card plus more alternative options like Atmospheric Weather Card, Weather Radar Card, Lovelace Windrose Card, and Meteoalarm Card.

Over the past few months, AI assistants have gone from useful chat tools to something more interesting: agents that can actually do things.

If you want to know if it makes financial sense to install a home solar system in Germany, or if you’re curious about how long these systems last, we have the answers for you.

I’ve been a happy Plausible Analytics user for a long time.

Another year has passed and 2025 is coming to an end.

This year, I once again had the honour of speaking at the adaptTo() 2025 conference in Berlin.

In my previous post about evcc, I introduced you to this powerful open-source energy management system and explained why it’s essential for anyone with solar panels and an electric vehicle.

Two weeks ago, I took the next step in optimizing our smart home energy setup by implementing evcc (Electric Vehicle Charging Controller).

Are you familiar with the following situation?

Ever wish your security camera could actually speak?

Two years ago, I wrote about backing up Home Assistant to a Synology NAS using NFS shares.

Our home’s solar energy system continued its upward trajectory in 2024.

We recently had the opportunity to present at adaptTo() in Berlin, one of the most anticipated tech conferences in the Adobe Experience Manager community.

As I wrote in my previous post, I recently switched from Arlo cameras to Reolink cameras.

I recently replaced all our security cameras around the house with new Reolink network cameras with either Wifi or PoE (Power of Ethernet).

Smart homes are becoming increasingly popular, and temperature and humidity sensors play a crucial role in automating home environments.

E-Ink displays are known for their low power consumption and crisp visibility.

In this annual update I give an update on the 2023 performance of our photovoltaic system and comparing it with previous years’ data.

Since sharing our initial insights into the Home Assistant setup at my first post about our Home Assistant setup, a lot has transformed.

For zero to go-live of your first website in 30 min.

This year’s AdaptTo 2023 conference in Berlin brought an exciting twist to my speaking journey.

Update: With the first two 2025 releases, there were some new features for Home Assistant backups.

In May Adobe hosted the Adobe Developers Live virtual conference for Adobe Experience Manager.

As I have run this website for a few years now and have been doing some re-designs and new stack changes, I have always thought about how the website performs.

I’m a big fan of Nintendo and Super Mario since I was a teenager.

Home Assistant is an open-source home automation platform that allows you to connect and control all the devices in your home.

In relation to my ESPHome water tank project I got a lot of inquiries about how to use an ultrasonic distance sensor with ESPHome.

In part 2 of my “Our Own Electricity” series I give an insight into our electricity production and consumption.

This one has been in my draft folder for a few weeks.

Last November, Adobe hosted the Adobe Developers Live Headless.

Little spiders on your shoulder # For this year’s Halloween project I built something without pumpkins.

Some readers recently asked me about the Wemos D1 mini usage in my projects and how this board can be used with ESPHome.

Home Assistant controlled garden watering part 2 - are you ready?

Watering your lawn and plants around the house wasn’t one of my favourite things to do.

Home Assistant & Arlo cameras go better together than I initially expected.

My daughter Mia is a huge dinosaur fan, almost a little dinosaur nerd.

In this post I will briefly describe my personal website’s history.

In the last few weeks and months, my colleagues and I have written several articles for the Adobe Tech Blog.

At the last Adobe Developers Live conference I gave a talk about how to extend AEM Content & Commerce with new Adobe Developer App Builder.

I would like to show you my new half 30 minutes no coding holiday Home Assistant project.

Together with my colleague Mark J.

I held a session on “Content and Commerce with Adobe Experience Manager” at the recent Adobe Developers Live | Content conference.

A mini TV for my daughter’s dollhouse # This project and the blog post about it were originally created in February 2019.

Today I want to share a little holiday project I build this week: a mailbox sensor to make a dumb mailbox smart and notifying us if we got new mail.

I want to share some professional projects I’m working on: Commerce Integration Framework and the AEM CIF Core Components are built by the team I’m working for at Adobe.

I try to gather and describe our Home Assistant setup here, along with the configuration in GitHub.

Home Assistant # I recently switched from OpenHab to Home Assistant.

From OpenHab to Home Assistant # This “project” is about the change I did from OpenHab to Home Assistant for our smart home automation system.