Automatic lights are magical. You walk into a room and the lights just turn on… to add this magic to your smart home you need motion sensors. Many motion sensors. Here is everything you need to know about them and my experience on how to find and install cheap and Read more…
Zigbee2MQTT is an awesome software to add support for all kinds of devices to your smart home controller. Setting up Zigbee2MQTT is pretty easy as I described in my earlier post but there are still a lot of questions I see about Zigbee2MQTT. In this article I will try to 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…
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…
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…
If you have read part 1 (otherwise you really should!) you now have nicely lit rooms, but this is about smart lights, right? What we are still missing are actual hardware controllers for the lights. The next step is to add some hardware to be able to actually control those Read more…
Zigbee smart home devices are everywhere today. Zigbee2MQTT is a software that allows you to control them all. Many different brands are producing Zigbee devices today so you might very easily end up with a bunch of different gateways and Apps to control them. And nothing working without an Internet Read more…