We have a newborn in the house, which means I now hold very strong opinions about logging things at 3 a.m. with one hand.
The whole reason you track feeds, diapers and sleep is the data. The pattern, the gaps, the "wait, when did she last eat." But that data only exists if logging it is effortless, and at 3 a.m. nothing that involves unlocking a phone, finding an app, waiting for it to load and tapping through three screens qualifies as effortless. So I made it one tap.
The software
The brain is a small Home Assistant add-on, FastAPI and SQLite, with a clean web page: one tap per feed, pump, diaper or sleep. That is the whole interface. No accounts, no menus, nothing to learn.
You can install it right now. In Home Assistant go to Settings → Add-ons
(called Apps on 2026.2 and newer) → Add-on Store, open the three-dot menu
→ Repositories, and add
https://github.com/hms-homelab/hms-baby-tracker.
Install Baby Tracker, set your timezone, hit Start, then Open Web UI. You
will want an MQTT broker such as the Mosquitto add-on for the native entities and
the remote; the credentials are auto-discovered.
The important part is where the data goes. Instead of trapping it inside its own little app, it publishes everything as native Home Assistant entities over MQTT. So the moment you log a feed, it is a real sensor in Home Assistant, sitting alongside everything else in the house. You get history, statistics, dashboards, and automations like "if no feed has been logged in four hours, send me a nudge." The baby data stops being an island and becomes just another part of the home.
The hardware
Here is the thing about a phone app, even a really good one: you still have to find the phone. At 3 a.m., in the dark, that is already too much.
So I built a physical remote. It is a 3D-printed box with an ESP32, a real keypad you can press without looking, and a small OLED that shows the last event and how long ago it happened. It sticks to the nursery wall. You walk in half asleep, press a button, and you are done. No unlock, no app, no bright screen in your face.
- Native Home Assistant entities over MQTT, no fragile hand-written YAML
- 3D-printed enclosure with an OLED showing the last event and time since
- Runs entirely local, your baby's data never leaves the house
Get it
The add-on, the hardware and the firmware are all open source, so you can build the whole thing yourself. The Home Assistant add-on, the brain that stores every event and publishes it over MQTT, lives in hms-baby-tracker. The DIY hardware side, the ESPHome config, the board files and the printable enclosure, is in baby-tracker-suite.
And because the very last thing a new parent wants is a soldering project, I also build the button remote and ship it ready to pair. You can get it on Amazon. Either way, the next 3 a.m. feed is one tap and back to bed.