The ESP32 makes more sense than a Raspberry Pi for your smart home
…Meanwhile, ESP32 is exactly what you need to build a device layer for your smart home. ESP32 can live in places that Pi can’t Size, heat, and power A fully kitted…
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I connected my dumb appliances to Home Assistant, and it felt like upgrading my whole house
…Spend $30 on a pair of local power monitoring plugs and let a home assistant learn their electrical signatures. Enjoy an incredibly sophisticated local smart home that will outlast any corporate cloud…
Your Zigbee mesh is drowning in cheap repeaters, and here's how to save it
…Zigbee is a low-bandwidth, low-power protocol designed for small data. When you flood your home with cheaper Wi-Fi/Zigbee smart plugs acting as repeaters, you're not building a…
I learned the hard way to never spin down your NAS hard drives
…And the power savings from spindown are practically negligible unless you’re running dozens of drives. For a home setup, the tradeoff simply isn’t worth it, unless heat is a major…
Someone built a four-node Raspberry Pi cluster you can pick up with one hand
…Related You can use a Raspberry Pi as a decent home server Despite their cute appearance, Raspberry Pi SBCs double as reliable server nodes
I upgraded my soundbar three times before realizing the actual weak link was sitting under the TV
…Ocarina of Time remake — I already made my own Ship of Harkinian powers a native PC port of the N64 classic. The best home theater upgrade starts with usability If your living…
This $9 switch makes it a breeze to add ports to your network
…It's a simple device that doesn't cost a lot, which is perfect for anyone looking to expand their home or office network. You can power it using AC, but you…
I avoided powerline Ethernet for years, but it solved the one connectivity gap nothing else could
…I've never had a good experience with powerline Ethernet adapters , so I didn't consider them, but it turned out to be the only thing that worked reliably where the TV…
Free NAS distros beat Synology's price, and the performance gap doesn't justify the markup
…running at home or in a small office setting, providing everyone with a central location to store lots of data. Synology NAS, like the DS925+ , is quiet, compact, and reliable. I've…
Your TV's Ethernet port might be slower than its Wi-Fi connection, but it actually doesn't matter
…wired Ethernet connection still beats the variable Wi-Fi connection on the grounds of reliability for most home setups. While the 100Mbps port on the TV does seem like a relic, it…