Posts in DIY


17 Common Smart Home Mistakes You Should Avoid

Posted on 8th Nov 2020 18:13:17 in DIY, General, IoT, Smart

It's no secret: everyone makes mistakes. Smart homes are not the exception as many beginners find themselves making the same mistakes before eventually learning why they are mistakes. Even those who are experts in smart technology still make mistakes, and many of them are quite common. Here is my list of 17 mistakes commonly made by smart home owners of every skill level, from complete beginner to expert!

Smart mistakes

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How to Build an RGB LED Strip Controller Easily

Posted on 20th Oct 2020 19:51:43 in DIY, Home Assistant, Tutorial

Colour-changing RGB strips are fun! While there is nothing wrong with buying a commercial kit, I found that they were quite expensive for what I wanted to do. Here we are going to use WS2812B LEDs in a strip to achieve individually addressable RGB lighting. All that just means that we can tell any LED on the strip to do something different than the rest, which is really cool for effects! Let's see how to build our own controller so we can control them from Home Assistant!

The DIY RGB LED strip controller!

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The Top 3 Best Smart Home Servers For DIY

Posted on 8th Oct 2020 23:55:21 in DIY, General, Smart

Smart home servers are perhaps one of the most important aspects of any given smart home. Despite that, they are often ignored or disguised using other terms such as "smart hub" or "controller". Understandably, this can cause quite a bit of confusion leading to many users simply purchasing whatever the most convenient option is. Depending on what you are doing, this can be a bad thing as there are many options to choose from, and it is easy to pick something underpowered or too expensive.

A smart home server

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How to Access Home Assistant From Any Where For Free

Posted on 6th Oct 2020 17:36:43 in DIY, Home Assistant, Tutorial

Home Assistant is a popular DIY platform for building a smart home. It allows the use of almost any smart device in the world via the integrations that are either part of the core software or released by the community. Unlike many of the other smart home controllers, there is no cloud-based solution allowing remote access provided out of the box. That's why we are going to be walking through the process of setting up remote access in Home Assistant, step by step.

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How to Easily Use a Raspberry Pi as a Homekit Hub

Posted on 4th Oct 2020 17:05:47 in DIY, Home Assistant, Tutorial

HomeKit is great. It allows anyone to effortlessly set up a smart home entirely offline without the usual hassle of finding a hub that uses an offline protocol and operates without connecting to the cloud. These benefits are typically reserved for those with a HomeKit hub such as a HomePod or an Apple TV. However, there is a way to use a Raspberry Pi as a hub allowing the use of compatible devices without needing an official HomeKit hub. 

Raspberry Pi as a HomeKit Hub

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