Introduction For years, my home network was housed in an IKEA Besta cabinet—a budget-friendly solution that worked but had its limitations. The components sat loosely inside, with cables running everywhere, and the network was managed by an unmanaged switch and a FritzBox modem/router. It was functional but far from optimal. You can read about the…
My Three-Year Journey with Home Assistant: The Brain of My Smart Home Three years ago, my journey into the world of smart home automation started with a simple problem: my wife and daughter sometimes forgot to turn off the hallway and bathroom lights. We use Philips Hue lights, and while they offer plenty of convenience…
In the recent weeks and months during the pandemic, I have seen many people sharing pictures of their home office setup to give others ideas about what works in certain scenarios and benefit from the experiences of others. I would like to tune into this and share my current home office setup – everything from…
Last year, I wrote an article about a DIY Network cabinet for my flat. This should be a central hub for all network connections and a nice clean space for all network devices such as routers, switches and NAS. This perfectly worked out while living in our flat but needed some adjustments when we moved…
As mentioned in my previous post, I am working on home automation (mainly) with HomeMatic IP (HMIP). Well, and one gap I could find in their quite extensive range of different sensors was, that they did not have a glass breakage sensor – only window/door opening sensors. But because I wanted to secure all windows…
Last year, we bought our own house. It is 15 years old and had a, for that time, quite modern equipment (electric window blinds, underfloor heating, electrical garage door etc.). But, of course, non of it was really ‘smart’. A fact that needed to be changed. Three major areas I wanted to tackle are: Window…