Baby Tracker: Home Assistant Add-on (+ ESP32 MQTT remote)

A self-contained Home Assistant app/add-on for newborn care tracking: feeds, diapers, sleep, pumping, baths, medicine, tummy time, weight and notes. You get a one-tap Ingress web UI, local storage, pump and feed reminders, and native Home Assistant entities. No n8n, no external database. It pairs with the ESP32 button remote from the baby-tracker-suite.

One-tap Ingress web UI (left), running as a native Home Assistant add-on (right) with Ingress, MQTT discovery, start-on-boot and ~1% RAM.

Want the physical button remote? The 3D-printed ESP32 remote that drives this dashboard has build details, photos and a demo on its project page. Rather not print and solder your own? A pre-built unit is available here. Either way the add-on works fully standalone.

The companion ESP32 Baby Remote: one-tap logging over MQTT, with a 0.96" OLED showing last feed, last pump and the next-pump reminder. Optional, the add-on works on its own.

Features

• One-tap logging of 17 event types across 8 categories (feed, pump, diaper, sleep, bath, medicine, tummy time, weight, plus regular and special notes).
• Ingress web UI: the colorful button dashboard, summary stats and journal, served right inside Home Assistant. No extra port to expose, no auth to manage.
• Native HA entities via MQTT discovery: sensor.baby_*, a binary_sensor for "currently sleeping", and a button.* for each action.
• Listens to the ESP32 remote on baby/remote/event (and baby/note).
• Fires every logged event on baby/event so you can build your own automations. Trigger on the MQTT topic, then notify any phone you like. It works for every source (web UI, companion app, or the remote), and the notify target picker behaves like any normal automation. See baby_tracker/DOCS.md.
• Pump reminders: per-side timer (default 2h) that sends a Home Assistant notification.
• Feed reminders: a single timer reset by each breast or bottle feed (default 3h).
• Self-contained: SQLite under /data, survives restarts, with an optional external database_url.
• Quiet until you ask for it: notifications only fire once you set notify_targets or wire up your own baby/event automation.

Install

1. Settings → Add-ons (shown as Apps on HA 2026.2+) → Add-on Store → ⋮ → Repositories.
2. Add: https://github.com/hms-homelab/hms-baby-tracker
3. Install Baby Tracker, set options (at least timezone), Start, then Open Web UI.

You'll want an MQTT broker (e.g. the Mosquitto add-on) for the remote and the native entities. Credentials are auto-discovered through the mqtt service. Full reference: baby_tracker/DOCS.md.

Run standalone (without Home Assistant)

The same app ships as a plain Docker image, so you can run it anywhere with no Supervisor:

# app + a Mosquitto broker for the ESP32 remote, data in ./data
docker compose up -d        # -> http://localhost:8099

or a single container:

docker run -d -p 8099:8099 -v "$PWD/data:/data" \
  -e TZ=America/New_York -e MQTT_HOST=192.168.1.10 \
  ghcr.io/hms-homelab/baby-tracker:latest

Config is via env vars instead of HA options: TZ, PUMP_HOURS, FEED_HOURS, MQTT_HOST, MQTT_PORT, MQTT_USERNAME, MQTT_PASSWORD, DATABASE_URL, DATA_DIR. Point the ESP32 remote's MQTT at the broker and presses log straight in. (HA notify targets only work when running as the add-on; baby/event still fires for your own MQTT automations.) Images are multi-arch (amd64 + arm64) and published on tagged releases.

Architecture

ESP32-C3 remote ─MQTT─┐
HA UI (Ingress) ──────┤
REST POST /api/event ─┼─▶ Baby Tracker (Docker, /data SQLite)
                      │     ├─ FastAPI: ingest + stats engine + journal
                      │     ├─ APScheduler: pump + feed reminders
                      │     └─ MQTT: discovery + state + baby/event
                      ▼
        HA entities + your automations + phone notifications

Options

MQTT auto-configures with the Mosquitto add-on; set mqtt_host as a fallback for an external broker.

Option	Type	Default	Description
timezone	string	America/New_York	IANA TZ for "today" rollover and log timestamps
pump_hours	float	2	Hours after a pump event before the reminder fires
feed_hours	float	3	Hours after the last breast/bottle feed before the feed reminder fires
notify_targets	list	[]	HA notify service names (without notify.) for alerts
mqtt_host	string	""	Fallback broker. Blank auto-discovers the Mosquitto/Supervisor broker; set it (e.g. 192.168.1.15) for an external broker like EMQX
mqtt_port	port	1883	External broker port (fallback only)
mqtt_username	string	""	External broker username, if it requires auth
mqtt_password	password	""	External broker password, if it requires auth
database_url	string	""	Optional external DB; empty uses the built-in SQLite

Development

cd baby_tracker
python3 -m venv .venv && ./.venv/bin/pip install -r requirements.txt pytest
DATA_DIR=/tmp/baby MQTT_ENABLED=0 ./.venv/bin/uvicorn app.main:app --port 8099
./.venv/bin/python -m pytest -q     # stats parity tests

Related Projects

• baby-tracker-suite: the full suite (HA dashboards, n8n flows, ESP32 remote hardware/firmware).
• hms-mm: dual ESP32-C3 WiFi SD-card bridge.
• hms-claude-mem: semantic memory MCP server.

License

MIT License. See LICENSE for details.

Support

If this project is useful to you, consider buying me a coffee!