I built my ultimate automatic smart light system and this is how you can do the same. You want lights that turn on and off automatically and always dimm to the right level? Lights that even change color (adaptive lighting/true tone/flux…) all on their own? It is possible with some Read more…
The Roborock S50 is a great cleaning robot with a great price. I have been using it for quite some time. Unfortunately it is always trying to climb on small ledges (like chair bases) just to get stuck there. Why did Roborock not make the front bumber height adjustable? Anyways Read more…
The old Echo Dots still work pretty well but they do take up some space and don’t sound very good. Instead I mounted mine to the wall with a 3D printed wall mount and connected it to some better speakers. External speakers I still have a couple of old (2nd Read more…
A modern smart home often relies on a lot of battery powered devices. That means you need a low battery warning to keep track of all of them and change batteries in time to avoid devices dropping from your network. Fortunately I found a nice and simple solution for this Read more…
Finding a great integrated blind control solution for a DIY smart home is hard. The IKEA Fyrtur and Kadrijl blinds are cheap compared to established producers and work better than most full DIY solutions. I bought one and tested it with my Home Assistant setup. The Fyrtur smart blinds The Read more…
Blueprints are an awesome new feature in Home Assistant that allow you to build & share generic automations for similar situations. You build a smart home to be able to automate common tasks but sometimes you do not have the time or knowledge to create them. That is where you Read more…
When I moved into my current apartment I wanted to built a custom ceiling lamp for my living room. The ingredients were clear: wood and filament LEDs hanging from the ceiling. With only a couple of hours of work I built this DIY lamp in a unique design. This is Read more…
Docker is great – keeping all your containers up to date not so much. Fortunately there is an easy fix to that: Watchtower. Docker and docker-compose allow you to easily run a bunch of services on a computer as cheap as the Raspberry Pi. Unfortunately with a lot of power Read more…
You are looking for a LastPass alternative? Recently LastPass changed their free tier – which was a less than popular decision which makes it pretty much unusable for many users. Fortunately I use a very different solution to store my passwords and here I am sharing how to do this: Read more…
Moving Docker data to an external SSD fixes a major flaw with my smart home system. Many people out there, including me, are running a small home server on a Raspberry Pi – usually running on a SD card with very limited space and a potentially very limited lifetime. Fortunately Read more…