Cloud-based automation services such as Zapier and Make let you connect different services together to automate tasks without having to build everything from scratch. If you'd rather not have all your personal automations running in the cloud, n8n gives you a different option.

The reason many of us build smart homes and tinker with microcontrollers is to make the mundane feel a little more special. Though these projects are far from necessary, they can bring a bit of magic to your everyday routines and teach you a thing or two along the way.

As someone who is very fond of my smart home setup, I’ll be the first to admit that a lot of it is surplus to requirements. Rarely would I recommend everyone install color-changing bulbs or relinquish control of the HVAC to just a smartphone app or a Home Assistant integration.

Android's NFC reader does more than tap to pay. Held against the right tag or accessory, it can do a ton of stuff. Here are just some things you can do that will immediately improve your experience.

We ask our smart home devices to do a lot for us, and rarely spare a moment to think about what life might be like for them. I decided to give some smart home devices personalities and let them loose in their own Discord chat to see what they would say if they could.

Smart bulbs are one of the most common entries into the world of smart home devices, but they're not without their problems. If your internet goes down, you may find that you lose features or simply can't control your bulbs at all. There are several ways to stop this from happening.

I added my Bambu Lab 3D printer to Home Assistant as soon as I realized I could, but it wasn’t until after doing so that I realized what I’d been missing out on. How you go about this depends largely on which printer you own, but there’s an integration out there for most printers.

We live in an increasingly digital world, but as Olivia Newton-John said, sometimes you just need to get physical. Here are three projects that let you interact with Home Assistant in a physical way.

Smart video doorbells can be incredibly useful, but they don't last forever. If you have an old or even broken video doorbell, you don't need to throw it away. There are plenty of ways you can put it to good use.

For many years, I built smart home automations that my family tolerated at best. It took a change of approach to finally create an automation that my family genuinely appreciated. That single automation ended up being a real turning point in how my family sees my smart home hobby.

NFC tags can be incredibly useful smart home tools. They're cheap to buy, and you can use them to trigger automations just by scanning them with a phone. Not all NFC tags are created equal, and it's all too easy to buy the wrong NFC tags for the job.

I use a lot of ESP32 boards around my home, but they don't always have to be stuck indoors. By putting an ESP32 in my car, I'm able to access live engine data from my car that tells me much more than my dashboard does.

I've owned a lot of houseplants in my time and killed many of them. The biggest issue has always been knowing when to water them. Wi-Fi moisture sensors can help, but if you have a lot of plants, the cost can soon add up, and if your Wi-Fi goes down, they become useless. Using an ESP32, you can make a moisture sensor that works offline and is a fraction of the price.

Tech prices are going through the roof, with the high cost of RAM affecting everything from Raspberry Pis to high-end gaming PCs. The good news is that with Home Assistant, it’s often possible to repurpose old tech so that you don’t need to buy anything new.

Home Assistant is incredibly powerful, but all that complexity means things can and do go wrong. I was tired of one of my most useful automations failing, so I decided to rewrite the automation with the expectation that it would fail. The result is that my smart home is now far more reliable.