Smart Home

Real-world smart home builds with Home Assistant, sensors, and integrations that survive past the honeymoon period.

Smart thermostat under $30: DIY with ESP32, no subscription

Smart thermostat under $30: DIY with ESP32, no subscription

A fully local smart thermostat from an ESP32, BME280 sensor, and relay, run by ESPHome and Home Assistant. No cloud, no subscription, under $30.

Hailo-8 vs Google Coral TPU for Frigate NVR: which edge AI accelerator wins in 2026

Hailo-8 vs Google Coral TPU for Frigate NVR: which edge AI accelerator wins in 2026

Hailo-8 (26 TOPS) vs Coral TPU (4 TOPS) for Frigate: inference FPS, power, camera limits, and cost per TOPS to pick your edge AI accelerator.

Five ESP32 chip modules on a grid, each emitting a colored radio halo, with a battery and a gauge needle pointing from milliamps down to microamps.

ESP32 boards for ESPHome: radio-first picks, deep-sleep tested

ESP32 boards for ESPHome compared by deep-sleep current and radio fit: pick C6 for Thread/Matter, H2 for Zigbee, S3 for BLE proxies in 2026.

Cutaway house drawn as a Zigbee mesh with sensor nodes wired to a coordinator stick and a few older nodes dropping off

Sub-$20 Zigbee sensors that stay on the Home Assistant mesh

Best Zigbee sensors under $20 for Home Assistant: real 2-year battery life, Zigbee2MQTT and ZHA pairing, and which secretly need the vendor hub.

Four radio-tower figures on a podium inside a cutaway house, with a cracked cloud icon severed above the local mesh

Zigbee vs Z-Wave vs Matter vs Thread: what Reddit says in 2026

Zigbee, Z-Wave, Matter, and Thread compared in 2026 through aggregated Reddit sentiment: real upvotes, hands-on verdicts, and who each one wins.

Multi-sensor weather station with ESP32 under $100

Multi-sensor weather station with ESP32 under $100

Build a sub-$100 ESP32 weather station with wind, rain, UV, and pressure sensors sending live environmental data to Home Assistant over ESPHome.