Smart Home Tech Getting Started with Raspberry Pi 4 - Top 5 Tips So you’re thinking about picking up a Raspberry Pi but aren’t quite sure where to start with everything else that goes with it? Today I’ll give you my 5 best tips to getting started with and making the most out of your Raspberry Pi once you hit
Home Assistant Home Assistant vs OpenHAB - Which one is better? Choosing a Home Automation Platform can be a really difficult decision and one that you will need to make when you begin your journey into the Home Automation world. It’s where all your smart devices will come together into a single unified experience and where you will be able
Guides Flashing any Smart bulb, plug or switch with Tuya-Convert I wrote last year about over the air flashing of smart bulbs using the Tuya-convert procedure. However, back then there was no current way to bypass a firmware that Tuya started loading onto newer devices to block this flashing. Why would you want to do this in the first place?
Reviews Ubiquiti Unifi Protect Review - Scalable Video Security Introduction If you’ve spent any time researching Wi-Fi solutions, you’ve probably came across Ubiquiti at some point, a major player in the enterprise space and now making serious inroads into the homes of many enthusiasts with their latest offering – Unifi Protect – their video surveillance platform which is in
Smart Home Tech FreeNAS Centralised Management - TrueCommand 1.1 release overview I’ve been personally using FreeNAS permanently for around 6 years or so, around the 8.3 release, and it is ony of my favourite open-source projects to date. As a NAS, it’s so simple and easy to use (although it did used to be a bit daunting!) and
Smart Home Tech LinITX APU2 D2 Review - An exceptional Home/SMB Firewall Netgate’s pfSense [https://www.pfsense.org/] has surged in popularity over the last few years and has grown to be the most popular open source firewall out there, and it’s easy to see why – it can be installed on a wide range of hardware, it’s very feature
Guides Building a bed occupancy sensor for Home Assistant Recently after automating many of my lights with motion sensors (guide here) I found myself wanting a way to automatically switch everything off at night. The question was how to properly determine when my partner and I had went to bed for the night? I started researching bed occupancy sensors
Guides DIY Philips Hue LED Strips - Installing ESPHome on Magic Home RGBW controllers Following on from our last post about installing ESPHome on cheap smart bulbs from Amazon [https://everythingsmarthome.co.uk/howto/how-to-install-esphome-or-tasmota-on-a-cheap-smart-wifi-rgb-bulb/] , this time we are going to take cheap RGBW controllers and LED strips and install ESPHome on them to add to our Home Assistant integration, expanding our DIY Philips