Reusable Home Assistant blueprints with comfortable installation and updates through a custom Home Assistant integration.
- Add this repository to HACS as an Integration custom repository.
- Download Hippo's Home Assistant Toolbox in HACS.
- Restart Home Assistant.
- Open Settings > Devices & services > Add integration and select Hippo's Home Assistant Toolbox.
No integration settings are required.
During setup, all active blueprints contained in this repository are installed automatically. In case you already installed some of the blueprints manually, they are adopted by the integration.
Files are installed under:
/config/blueprints/<domain>/hippotastic/
Before replacing an existing file, the integration keeps up to three copies in:
/config/blueprints/.hippos_toolbox_backups/
By default, the integration checks the published blueprints once per day. New and changed blueprints appear together as an update for the Blueprints update entity. Installing that update downloads the exact source files and reloads affected Home Assistant domains.
Use the Check for updates button entity to run the catalog check immediately. This only checks for changes; it does not install them.
Every installation follows the Stable channel by default; initial setup does not ask for a channel. Stable reads the blueprint catalog from the latest published GitHub release.
To allow testing unreleased changes, open Settings > Devices & services > Hippo's Home Assistant Toolbox > Configure and select the Development channel. This will increase the update check frequency to every 2 hours and follow the latest catalog commit on main. Switching back to Stable is supported at any time.
The Development channel only affects blueprint content. HACS continues to update the integration itself from published releases.
The integration can expose an existing JPEG snapshot camera through a RAM-only cache. Dashboard cards receive the previous full-resolution frame immediately while the source is refreshed in the background. With a live camera card, a newly fetched frame replaces the cached image without reloading the dashboard.
To add one, open Settings > Devices & services > Hippo's Home Assistant Toolbox, open the integration entry's three-dot menu, and select Add progressive snapshot camera. Add one helper for each source camera. YAML configuration is not required.
Configure Area, Picture Glance, or Picture Entity cards with the new camera entity and set camera_view: live for immediate cache-to-fresh transitions. With camera_view: auto, Home Assistant still shows the cache immediately, but its standard still-image polling controls when the refreshed frame appears. Area Cards automatically select a camera from the area; hide the original snapshot entity—but do not disable it—if the Area Card should select the progressive camera linked to the same source device.
Frames are intentionally kept only in RAM and are rebuilt after every Home Assistant restart or integration reload. Automatic warmup begins after 30 seconds. Idle cameras refresh every 30 seconds through a staggered background queue with at most two source snapshots in flight. A live view shows the cached frame immediately and then follows its source. Native MJPEG sources use one shared upstream connection per progressive camera; their JPEG payloads are remuxed without decoding or recompression and distributed to every live card. Still-only sources follow the source camera's snapshot interval instead. A failed source keeps its last frame and adds a connection-problem marker until the next successful refresh. Version 1 accepts JPEG snapshots and MJPEG streams containing complete JPEG frames only.
The runtime uses custom_components/hippos_toolbox/assets/connection_problem.png. Its editable source is assets/camera-overlay/connection_problem.svg. After changing that SVG, regenerate the PNG with:
pnpm camera-overlay:renderThe renderer is generic. Optional positional arguments select another SVG, output path, and square pixel size:
pnpm camera-overlay:render -- path/to/icon.svg path/to/icon.png 512Setup, behavior, formulas, triggers, scheduling rules, and log examples are documented in Irrigation Blueprints.
Setup, gestures, session behavior, failover, player compatibility, and LED feedback are documented in Push-Button Music Controller.
The integration is the recommended installation method. Individual blueprints can still be imported manually.
-
Hippo's Cover Automation
Source · Import manually into Home Assistant -
Hippo's Time-Based Exponential Moving Average (EMA)
Source · Import manually into Home Assistant -
Hippo's Irrigation Zone Calculation
Source · Import manually into Home Assistant -
Hippo's Irrigation Scheduler
Source · Import manually into Home Assistant -
Hippo's Push-Button Music Controller
Source · Import manually into Home Assistant -
Hippo's Sensor-based State Machine
Source · Import manually into Home Assistant
Development and release instructions are documented in CONTRIBUTING.md.