Smart Home Archive
All 8 Smart Home articles, newest first. Back to the Smart Home overview.
A one-tap Cinema Mode for movie night: color-matched smart lights, a Home Assistant automation, and the TV settings that actually matter.
Four years, nine cameras and one alarm system later: what Ring actually gets right, the false alarms that made us rip out the motion sensors, and whether the subscription is worth it.
A step-by-step method for building a clean, Apple-inspired Home Assistant dashboard with an AI co-pilot — entity list, clear concept, the right cards, and iterative YAML.
Three honest ways to let an AI help with your Home Assistant YAML — SSH, MCP, and plain chat — plus the entity list that stops the model from guessing IDs.
The official Nabu Casa bundle: Home Assistant Green as the brain plus the Connect ZWA-2 Z-Wave radio. A ready-made, local-first smart home with no DIY and no subscription.
Echo Show 5, 8, and 11 combine great sound, Alexa smarts, and an outstanding photo frame that makes your Amazon Photos library part of everyday family life.
A calm, private, local-first brain for your entire smart home that unifies Hue, Ring, Zigbee, Z-Wave, Matter, and more—fast automations, beautiful dashboards, and zero cloud lock-in.
Turn Home Assistant into a real, local-first smart-home brain. This SONOFF Zigbee 3.0 USB coordinator delivers instant, private control of lights, sensors, buttons, and plugs—no cloud required.