Tutorials
Put any percentage in your house on your iPhone lock screen
A few days ago I put my 3D printer’s progress on my iPhone lock screen. Then it showed up on my watch. And then, without me changing anything, it appeared…
Author: the_smart_home_maker
Inspirations
The Self-Healing Smart Home: How AI Keeps My House Running (So I Don’t Have To)
Here's the dirty secret nobody selling you smart home stuff will admit: a smart home slowly falls apart. Not in a dramatic way. Quietly. A battery dies in a door…
Inspirations
How I taught my garage camera to remember bin day
Update, September 2026. I rebuilt this twice since publishing. The calibrated bounding boxes in Step 2 are no longer what runs in my garage — they failed in a way…
Inspirations
AI Is a Magic Box: How Two Smart-Home Builders Actually Use It
Lukas (hobbyblogging.de) and I have known each other for a while. Two builders, two smart homes, two evenings spent under similar AI rabbit holes. So when we sat down to…
Inspirations
Family Stress Score — one number from six honest signals
Some days are loud and short, everyone’s head is full – and you only realize at dinner that the house was running at 180 the whole afternoon. For exactly those…
Tutorials
Is This the END of Home Assistant Dashboards?
I’m going to say something that might get me kicked out of the community: The traditional Home Assistant dashboard is dead. We’ve spent years YAML-hacking and fighting with grid layouts…
Tutorials
How I Set Up Frigate NVR with Face Recognition on an Intel N100 Mini PC
Those of you who follow my channel know that I already had Frigate NVR running on Proxmox until my Mini PC crashed. I had 5 Reolink cameras but no recording,…
Inspirations
AI-Powered Inventory System — How Nova Tracks Every Component in My Smart Home
If you're anything like me, you've got drawers full of resistors, ESP32 boards, sensors, and connectors — and you never know what you actually have. My AI assistant Nova now manages my…
Inspirations
AI-Powered Smart Home Architecture — How My Home Thinks for Itself
My smart home is powered by two AI pillars: an AI DevOps pipeline that builds and maintains everything — and an AI automation layer the whole family uses every day. In this post, I'll…
Tutorials
Want to make your home smart but don’t know where to start? Which platform is right for you? Zigbee, WiFi, Matter – what does it all mean?
That's exactly why I built the Smart Home Advisor – an interactive tool right here on the website that gives you an overview and personalized recommendations in just a few…