Home Assistant Podcast Tsvi Mostovicz on creating the Jewish Calendar component
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Sep 9, 2025 Join Tsvi Mostovicz, the developer behind Home Assistant's Jewish calendar component, as he shares insights into creating Sabbath-compliant automations. He discusses his journey into home automation, highlighting the balance between technology and religious practices. Tsvi delves into challenges like integrating various devices and the importance of community-driven projects. He also envisions the future of smart home technology, sharing hopes for advanced features and improved user interactions in automation.
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Early Home Automation Journey
- Tsvi started with X10 and later used a Vera hub before moving to Home Assistant around version 0.2–0.3.
- He ran HA on an old EPC, then Raspberry Pi, now a cheap NUC running Home Assistant OS.
Protocol Agnostic Setup Works
- Tsvi uses multiple protocols (Z-Wave, Zigbee, Wi‑Fi) and chooses devices by stability and availability, not protocol purity.
- Home Assistant lets him bridge these different protocols into seamless automations.
Building The Jewish Calendar Integration
- Tsvi built a Jewish calendar integration to enforce Sabbath rules like time-triggered automations and to provide an "is u melacha" binary sensor.
- He migrated code from AppDaemon and iterated on bugs and user requests over many years.