Category: Home Automation

I bought an iRobot Roomba i7+ in 2021 to clean the one bedroom flat I had just moved into. It has served well since. It has moved apartments with me twice and shows up in both my 2022 and 2025 home…

My avocado tree started life under a cheap clip-on grow light from Amazon. The tree is five years old now and much grown. Back in my 2022 home automation post I put the grow light first in line for…

Okos Polip is the device-to-cloud service I built for my own hacked devices. You might be wondering why that odd name? Well okos is smart in Hungarian and polip is octopus. A smart octopus with a…

Back in undergrad, when I set up the LED strip around my apartment’s living room window, I thought the little IR remote it came with was fine. Point, click, color changes. Simple. Then I lost the…

It has been a few years since I did a home automation update (see my 2022 update) and a lot has changed. I moved (twice), got some new devices, have both Google Home and Alexa agents, and started work…

When I moved out to the Bay Area (California), I purchased a small KOIOS air filter to keep the wildfire smoke at a reasonable level in my (at the time) one-bedroom apartment. After a while, I…

This is a short retrospective post on my home automation setup back in undergrad at MSOE. Unfortunately this was not well documented, but it was an interesting start to my home automation tinkering…

Generally, I love my Third Reality Smart Switches. I currently have three single-pole light switches configured (garage, kitchen, and hallway) and a three-way light switch for the stairs, all without…

My goal someday is to have a nearly fully automated smart house with robot butlers serving me drinks on voice command. Unfortunately I am not there yet. I do, however, have a start to my home…