In this folder, I’m documenting my smart home / home automation setup, plans and learnings.
I live in a rental apartment so I have very limited opportunities to change anything structural like wirings or switching light switches or adding Ethernet ports to every room. So I got to get by with what I can do.
Principles
I have three main principles when I decide what to include in my setup and how. I try to stick to them because I know from experience that making compromises hurts later. Still, getting something done can occasionally be more important than strictly sticking to these principles.
- Smart home must be a progressive enhancement. Anything that it controls must be controllable without it.
- Everything that doesn’t require internet must be doable with local network only with no access to Internet.
- No vendor-lock with proprietary commercial platforms.
Goal(s)
I don’t want to go into a full smart home mark mode and look for problems where they don’t exist. Rather, I want to have the tools and know-how to be able to identify things that I can automate to make my life easier and then implement them. I want home automation or smart home to be an addition rather than a necessity.
My goal of documenting the process in this digital garden is to document for myself what I’ve done and how, and to re-record the steps in a way that I understand since I’m still struggling a lot with the official documentation and the integration/add-on documentation. They seem to require a lot of knowledge of how the system works.
Home Assistant
I originally started with having Philips Hue lights (a decision I’ve grown to regret, see principle no. 3) but in summer of 2025 after discovering that some of my existing devices support controlling them over the web, I bought a Rapsberry Pi, installed Home Assistant and started tinkering and learning how the system works.
I run it on a Raspberry Pi 5, 4GB model with a 256 GB micro-SD card. I installed the Home Assistant OS to make it easy to get started.
Other people’s stuff
Home automation / smart home scene is very vocally filled with tech influencers who focus on new gadgets and often feel like they are creating smart home integrations just for the sake of creating content.
But there are some really good ones who show practical use cases. Stock Pot’s 8 Automations We Actually Use and Rebecca Keys’ A day inside my quietly smart apartment are great examples. Their approaches are very nicely in-line with my principles of progressive enhancements and building things that seamlessly integrate with daily life instead of having to be controlled via a phone or tablet.