You want to see everything going on in your smart home at one glance? Then you need a smart home dashboard!Smart home control systems like OpenHab and Home Assistant usually offer nice ways to display important data about your smart home. What they do less well is display data over Read more
A simple way to add some awesomeness to your wardrobe is to add lighting. Smart wardrobe lights look great and help find things more quickly. I build a cheap do-it-yourself solution which has some great effects not found in off the shelf solutions. All of this is done for around Read more
You bought a Denon receiver for your home theater? You have a smart home? Why not combine both to a smart home theater? Imagine lights out, receiver on with one click! Like in the cinema… My home theater setup Here is an overview of my current (smart) home cinema setup. Read more
You are looking to create scenes in OpenHab and don’t know how? Well you are not the only one! While OpenHab is a pretty awesome home automation platform the concept of scenes is just not properly supported. Most solutions are overly complicated but here is a simply solution for simple Read more
One of the main problems with smart homes is how to improve usability by allowing control via “legacy” switches instead of relying on Apps and voice assistants. One great way of doing this is by adding smart relays to your existing wall switches and keep using them. For any case Read more
Having an unreliable Internet connection is annoying. Constantly getting asked for speedtest measurements over a couple of days by your Internet provider instead of actual help is even worse. Bad enough to implement a system that regularly measures your Internet connection. This is how it can be done with OpenHab. Read more
Even the best smart home system does not do you much good if the controller becomes unresponsive. Mine runs on a Raspberry Pi and recently died due to a software issue. To avoid something like happening again I updated my monitoring of the Pi itself. Here is a simple way Read more
Battery powered smart home devices are great. Usually small and unobtrusive and usable everywhere without the need for wires. Unfortunately batteries run out of power at one point and quietly loosing an important sensor is not so great. Here is how to build a battery level warning system to avoid Read more
Do you have water pipes, a washing machine or a dishwasher? Awesome perks of modern technology but also a risk. Flooding your house or apartment is neither cheap nor enjoyable. While there is no 100% way to avoid this possibility an early warning system with a water leak sensor will Read more
No one likes cleaning, yet we have to do it all the time. Smart robot vacuums are a great way out of this misery. They works tirelessly, efficient and even while you are sleeping. Pretty much one of the best smart home buys you could go for. But before you Read more