Start here. Foundational guides to help you build your first connected home.
If you’ve spent any time in smart home forums, YouTube, or Reddit threads, you’ve seen the name pop up everywhere: Home Assistant. People rave about it the way enthusiasts rave about Linux — as the “real” smart home platform, the one that escapes Big Tech’s walled gardens, the one that finally puts you in control….
Walk into any hardware store’s lighting aisle today and you’ll see a wall of options that didn’t exist a decade ago — smart bulbs in every shape, brand, colour, and price tier. The marketing on every box promises the same things, the differences are buried in specs, and a beginner is left with the only…
It’s one of the first real decisions you’ll face when stepping into smart lighting, and it trips up almost everyone: should you buy smart bulbs, or smart switches? They sound like two ways of doing the same thing — making your lights controllable from your phone or your voice — but underneath, they work very…
It’s a fair question — and one worth asking before you fill your home with smart bulbs, not after. If a smart bulb depends on Wi-Fi, what happens the moment your router reboots, your internet provider has an outage, or you simply move a lamp to a corner the signal can’t reach? Are you suddenly…
If you’ve just started building a smart home, you’ve probably run into two words that seem to mean exactly the same thing: scenes and routines. Understanding smart light scenes vs routines is one of the first real steps from owning smart bulbs to running a smart home. They sit side by side in the Alexa…