Why and how you should make your home smart
It's cheap and secure!
Your average day starts with an alarm on your phone.
Sometimes, you wake up a couple of minutes before it sounds.
Sometimes, you find the button to snooze it.
Sometimes, you’re already on the phone and it appears as a notification.
But when you finally stop it, the lights in your room turn on and you start your day.
You walk out of your room. A presence sensor detects your motion, and a bulb in a cute little bamboo lamp from IKEA outside your room lights up.
You go downstairs, into the living room/kitchen/workspace area. As you come in, 20 different lights turn on in perfect sync. It is very satisfying.
You put some buckwheat to boil. Go upstairs to load a washing machine. Go through your morning routine (when you stop by your room, the lights turn on as you enter).
You go back downstairs. The lights are still on: You’ve not left the area for long enough. You eat your buckwheat with oat milk, open the laptop, and do some work.
An hour later, a notification appears: the washing machine has finished washing. (Depending on whether you tapped an NFC tag next to the washing machine with your phone, it is sent either as a push to your phone only, or as a message to a channel in your house Discord and that everyone can see. You tried to make the Discord bot’s name cute, so it’s House Elf.)
After half an hour, you finally go upstairs to unload the washing machine, then return to work.
In the evening, you’re hosting a meow party: someone on Twitter made a joke that there should be a party where people are only allowed to communicate in cat noises. A friend shared it with you when you were looking for party ideas, and you decided it would be very funny to attempt to do that, and so every hour, for 20 minutes, people are only allowed to communicate in cat noises.
You make the lights colorful and cosy and dim.
A group of people is playing a game on a large table. In meows, they communicate to you they want the light to be brighter so that they can see the colors of their cards better. You pull out a phone and with a couple of taps, make the bulb over that part of the table brighter and more towards the white color.
You hear happy cat noises.
Some other day, you’re cuddling on the couch, but it gets cold. You don’t want to leave the cuddles, so you ask Siri to close the windows in the living room. The windows close.
You later go to your room to sleep. It is warm, exactly the right temperature. Later, you wake up and want to get some water. You press on a light switch, and the dim red lights turn on. When you go back to the bed, the lights turn off on their own.
The above is not a tale. This is what my home is actually like and what my days are actually like.
I think it’s awesome.
And you can turn your home into all of that and more. And it is surprisingly cheap and easy to set up!
When I moved in, it took me a few days to move the home from its old boring state to what you’re reading above. This can be what your life is like!
It saves so much time and makes everything so much more aesthetically pleasant and convenient!
Everything can run locally. All the lights and actuators use mesh networks, not WiFi, without the Chinese gov being able to use it to spy on you.
The sky is the limit on what your home can do.
At some point, I thought it’d be funny to have a button that causes apples to appear, the way Trump is said to have had a button that causes Coke to appear.
I made a browser-use agent and exposed its API to the smart home system and got a nice round button.
If I press it, 15 minutes later, a delivery person appears and gives me apples.
To live in a smart house like that, I’d be willing to spend much more on rent per year than it actually costs to make it, because it can be incredibly cosy, and convenient, and at the same time, very cheap and straightforward to set up.
If you’re convinced or curious, here are opinionated instructions on how to get started:
1. Home Assistant
You need a core of your smart home that interfaces with you and all of your devices and everything else you want to integrate.
There are many smart home hubs that belong to closed ecosystems with issues. And there’s one hub that stands out: Home Assistant.
It is not just “open-source”. Last year, it was the top-1 repo on GitHub by number of contributors.
It’s a home server that supports virtually everything smart basically out of the box, and powers everything smart about my home.
It passes security audits from top pentesting firms.
Home Assistant doesn’t have to be exposed to the internet. But want to use it remotely and afraid of zero-days? Put it behind a CloudFlare tunnel with a Zero Trust access firewall and use it.
It is infinitely customizable. It has everything built-in, but you can very easily make it completely your own (without even writing any code, though if you’re willing to copy-paste yaml from your favorite LLM, you can do literally everything with it).
There are, of course, great apps for iOS and Android, and an infinity of things and features a huge community has made.
It connects to everything. Have a WiFI speaker that your iPhone can’t share music to? Home Assistant can expose an AirPlay entity and send the audio to that speaker. I’m not aware of anything Home Assistant doesn’t support or can’t do.
(Have an Alexa? You can control everything in your smart home with it, if you want to. And yes, you can fully customize which of your smart home devices Alexa will see.)
Trust your Claude so much you want it to be able to control the lights in your living room, but only if you ask it with a little poem? Easy.
(If for some reason you already have devices connected to WiFi, Home Assistant will discover and offer to add all of them.)
It can be run on almost anything (any box that can run an OS or a docker container), but the easiest way to get started in a new home is to buy Home Assistant Green, a small $130 server that wants to be connected to the local network via an Ethernet cable. Or if you already have any sort of small home server, you can install a Docker container on it.
You’ll start by plugging it in, turning it on, and opening the Home Assistant app on your phone. Your home is now smart!
2. Local network
Many smart Chinese lightbulbs and other smart home devices use WiFi and want to talk to and be managed via Chinese servers. That’s terrible. While it is possible to take local control of them and disconnect them from the internet (google “[device/brand name] locally home assistant”), it’s somewhat annoying to do, and much easier to just avoid almost everything that uses wifi to not potentially expose the local network.
So, ideally, you want the devices in your home not to use WiFi.
How do you do that?
There are two protocols, Zigbee and Z-Wave. Both are mesh networks: most devices on your network with external power also serve as routers.
You add a USB stick/antenna (examples produced by a nonprofit that manages the development Home Assistant: Zigbee ($45), Z-Wave ($80) (both can be found cheaper if you particularly care)) to your home assistant server to allow it to serve as the mesh network coordinator and manage all the devices on the network.
Zigbee is the older one, with many more devices supporting it. I’d start with Zigbee and maybe later also add Z-Wave.
Both use very little power, so battery-powered sensors and buttons will work for months to years without requiring battery replacements.
3. Lights
Smart CCT+RGB lights are the coolest thing about all of this.
You can have amazing bright white lights you feel happy being around (especially if you live in cloudier parts of the world), that turn all sorts of cozy color schemes when you want them to, or turn red in the evening because you don’t want to expose yourself to blue & green light and want to want to go to sleep at the right time.
The lowest barrier to entry is with Zigbee lightbulbs: you simply replace a boring old bulb with a smart bulb. There are lots of them: from more expensive Philips Hue bulbs ($20-70 per bulb) with mediocre CRI1 (80) but awesome colors and effects (such as the fireplace effect) to the fairly cheap IKEA bulbs ($18-22 per bulb) with worse colors (the red will be a little bit pink, which is a bit annoying if you want perfect red in the evening) but much better CRI of 90.
But the perfect choice is the Auxmer LED strips. You can pick CRI 95+ CCT+RGB 5m strips ($76) + a Zigbee controller ($23) + any 24V 200W power supply adapter from Amazon ($25), and place them somewhere with a diffuser or pointing up/towards the walls (they’re to bright to be directly looked at at max brightness without a diffuser). I have never seen anyone have better lighting than this. The red is so perfectly red!
For some lights, you can plug them into the wall via a Zigbee smart plug (see below), which lets you remotely turn them on and off.
For completeness: I’ve never done that, but you can also use smart switches instead of normal light switches in the walls, to turn on/off or dim legacy lights.
4. Sensors and actuators
Motion/presence sensors: detect if there are people/movement. They can use infrared and/or microwave Doppler effect from motion. You should go either for random small $1-5 sensors from Aliexpress that just see large-scale movement in front of them or $40-70 Everything Presence sensors that not only say whether there is someone present, but can also track the coordinates of up to three people in quite a large area (this is how I can tie automations to me being on my bed or in front of a desk in my room, but you can do more fun stuff). You can use automation blueprints like this one to tie a bunch of lights to a bunch of sensors and optionally some additional controls. (Many of them also detect illuminance, but the only time I used that was when I placed one on the intercom to automatically answer it.)
Air quality sensors. Temperature, CO2, humidity, PM2.5, volatile organic compounds. No particular recommendations, anything works. There are many air quality sensors with Zigbee. My house already had an Awair connected via wifi and I connected my Aranet 4 via a $9 Bluetooth bridge.
There are also vibration sensors, door state sensors, leak/wetness sensors, etc.
Switches. Come in all forms and shapes. React to touches or presses. Have arbitrary numbers of buttons. Search Zigbee switches on Aliexpress or anywhere else. (They can be placed on walls, on tables, or anywhere else.)
Fun/weird input devices. Wanna change the lighting by turning a cube on a side? (If you see it requires some proprietary Zigbee hub, ignore that.)
Smart plugs. They can be turned on and off remotely and some of them let you know the current, voltage, etc.; this allows you to know the state of otherwise dumb devices (or devices you don’t want to connect to the internet), such as washing machines. $10 from IKEA. (Search your local IKEA for the local type of plugs.)
Fingerbots. These are great. If you have any physical buttons that you want to press remotely, you can get a bunch of those ($15 from Aliexpress). They’ll press things for you. (This is how opening and closing windows in our living room works.)
Thermostats: they control the flow of water in the radiators in specific rooms. They come with kits that make them compatible with virtually all radiators. (If you install one, you’ll unlock bonus knowledge of the very surprising interface that thermostats have.) No more manually rotating anything! (Use the Better Thermostat integration to use actually great algorithms for optimally supporting a nice temperature + being able to use a temperature sensor that’s not the one inside the thermostat.)
All other kinds of smart moving things. From smart blinds to (if you’re brave enough) sous vide.
You can also collect and use all other sorts of information in all kinds of creative ways: from weather or public transport info to calculating energy expenditure of all of the smart devices (volunteers have measured it for most things you can find!),.
5. Automations
Have an idea for what you want your smart home to do? I’d bet you’ll be able to easily implement it. It is very straightforward to set up automations using the interface, but you can also ask your favorite AI assistant to write yaml for you to not have to click on things.
Look for guides or ask your AI assistant!
There’s a ton of guides for how to get started with Home Assistant. Open and follow any of them or ask chatgpt. It is actually very straightforward, and if you’re curious, look up how to make your home smart.
CRI is Color Rendering Index. It is one of the ways of measuring how well the light spectrum of a bulb represents the light spectrum of the sun. Even if your home is not smart, you really want to have high-CRI light, for a bunch of reasons. Especially if you live in a cloudy part of the world.
Security audits is in my estimate step 0.
The lack of transparency there has made me fear smart homes, rather than aspire to integrate with the grid