Finding Lost Things With Image AI
Losing something inside your own home is a particular kind of annoying, because you know it is there somewhere.
I put generative AI to work on the camera images from the house. It can recognise objects and people in a picture, which makes it possible to ask where something was last seen.
It started as a security experiment and turned into something closer to a search function for the household.
When My Home’s AI Started Cracking Jokes
I gave the notifications in my house a sense of humour. Push messages and spoken announcements were written by a generative AI with instructions to be funny.
Some of them landed. Others were the kind of joke that is only amusing to the person who set it up.
My wife was noticeably less delighted by the experiment than I was, which is probably a fair review in itself.
Morning Briefings When I Enter The Room
The first minutes of the day are when a short, well-timed piece of information is worth the most.
My house now greets me with a personalised message the moment I walk into a particular room. Presence detection recognises that someone has entered, and that triggers it.
The text is put together by AI from the data my Home Assistant setup already collects, so the briefing reflects the actual state of the house rather than a canned phrase.
Ten AI Ideas For The Connected Home
This is the opening piece of a series in which I go through ten ways generative AI can change how a home behaves.
The common thread is that all of it runs on top of a normal automation platform such as Home Assistant, so these are ideas anyone with an existing setup could try.
Some are practical, others are closer to playing around. Together they give a decent picture of what is already possible today.
Twenty Thousand Subscribers, Briefly Celebrated
A number went past that I honestly did not expect when I started posting my projects: twenty thousand subscribers.
Behind that figure are a lot of people who watch someone solder, wire and occasionally get things wrong, and who stick around anyway. That is not something I take for granted.
So this is a short thank-you to everyone who has been following along, and then it is straight back to the workbench and the next unfinished project.
A Self-Built NFC Tag Door Opener
Keys are the one part of the house that never got any smarter, so I built my own way around them.
Holding an NFC tag against the reader opens the door. NFC works over a few centimetres, the same contactless technology used when paying with a card.
The tag itself is small enough to disappear into a pocket, and there is nothing to charge or unlock first.
Voice Satellites: Building Versus Buying
A voice satellite is the small box in a room that listens for a spoken command and passes it to the system running the house.
You can build one yourself or buy a ready-made unit, and I put the two options side by side.
The honest answer is that it depends on how much of your evening you want to spend on it, and I go through what each way actually costs you in effort.
I Designed My Own Home Control Handset
Rather than buying a controller, I designed one: my own circuit board with an ESP32, a small programmable chip with built-in wireless, running the free ESPHome firmware.
That combination lets the remote talk to Home Assistant, so one device can switch lights or adjust the heating without opening an app.
I go through the whole path, from drawing the circuit board to getting the chip programmed and the buttons doing what they should.
Every Button On The Remote Responds
Small milestone on the self-built remote: every single button now does what it is supposed to.
Getting there took considerably more troubleshooting than the finished result suggests, which is usually how these projects go. The last few inputs are always the stubborn ones.
This is a quick look at the board with every input finally responding the way it was meant to from the start.
My Self-Built Remote Comes To Life
The remote I have been building is starting to feel like a real device rather than a pile of parts.
The button board I drew up myself works, and it performs better than I expected at this stage. A few details still need adjusting, but I am confident about getting them sorted.
Another step towards controlling everything in the house from one thing I made myself.
Soldering Buttons Onto The Remote Board
The unglamorous part of a hardware project: sitting at the bench and soldering buttons and wires onto the circuit board.
It is slow, repetitive work with no shortcuts, and it quietly decides whether the finished remote will feel solid or wobbly in the hand later on.
This is a short glimpse of that stage, well before anything gets switched on for the first time.
Preparing The Garden For The 2025 Season
The gardening year starts well before anything is green, and this is the point where I get the technical side ready again.
Sensors and watering hardware come back out, get checked and go back into place for the coming season.
It is unspectacular preparation work, but it is what stops things failing later in summer when it actually matters.
A Better Trigger For My Fixed Air Conditioner
The air conditioning unit in our house is a fixed installation, and until now switching it on meant walking over to it and pressing a button by hand.
In this clip I show the alternative I ended up using: the unit gets started the same way as everything else in my home, without touching the device itself.
It is a small change in daily use, but it removes one of those little detours that quietly annoy you every single time.
The Button Board For My Remote Arrived
The package I had been waiting for is here: the circuit board that carries the buttons for the universal remote I am building for my smart home.
A circuit board is simply the thin plate that holds the electronics and the wiring between them. This one exists purely so the buttons sit in the right spots and connect cleanly to the rest.
Holding a part you drew on a screen a few weeks earlier is the point where a project stops being an idea.
Controlling My Home From The Apple Watch
My watch turned out to be one of the fastest ways to reach the house. No unlocking a phone, no hunting for an app icon, just a glance at my wrist.
In this video I walk through how Home Assistant, the open software that runs my smart home, ends up on the watch and what that looks like in practice.
It does not replace the phone for everything. For the handful of things I trigger ten times a day, it is clearly the shorter path.
Why My Remote Needs Real Buttons
A remote that only works if you know which menu to open is a remote that only I will use. That is the reason I am adding proper buttons you can press.
Everyone in the house should be able to pick the thing up and get something to happen, without a tutorial and without asking me first.
In this clip I show where the buttons go and how they fit into the housing I am building around them.
Eight Buttons On Only Four Connections
The small computer inside my remote has a limited number of connection points for things like buttons, and I wanted more buttons than points.
So I wired them in a pattern where each button sits at the crossing of two lines. The chip then works out which one was pressed from that combination instead of needing its own wire per button.
The result is eight buttons running on four connections, which leaves room for the other parts I still want to attach.
Swapping Out My Old Camera Detection Setup
The software that looked at my camera pictures and decided whether a person was in them had been outdated for a while. I finally sat down and replaced it with Frigate.
Frigate now runs on my small home server and reports back into Home Assistant, so the camera events land in the same place as the rest of my automations.
A tutorial from another creator saved me a lot of trial and error here, and the setup has been running nicely since.
Where My Universal Remote Project Goes Next
Time for a status update on the remote I am building. This clip is less about a finished part and more about the plan for the coming steps.
I go through what is already settled, what still needs a decision, and which pieces have to come together before the thing can leave my desk.
Laying that out loud also keeps me honest about the order in which I tackle it.
One Remote For The Entire Smart Home
Lights here, blinds there, media somewhere else. My house had collected a pile of separate controls, and I got tired of picking the right one.
So I started building a single handheld device that talks to all of it. This clip is the introduction to that project and the idea behind it.
The goal is not another gadget on the shelf. It is one object anybody can grab that actually covers what the house can do.
