A Printed Replacement Wheel For The Stroller
One wheel on the kids’ stroller gave up, and buying a whole new one for a single part felt wrong.
So I measured the broken piece, modelled a replacement and let the 3D printer run. Plastic parts like this are exactly what a home printer is good at: small, simple, and cheap enough to try twice if the first version is off.
The stroller rolls again. Not a spectacular repair, just one more thing that stayed out of the bin.
Building A Child-Safe Lock For A Cupboard
Some drawers in a house with kids simply need to stay shut. That was the starting point for this build: a lock for a cupboard or a drawer that I put together myself.
It opens in three ways — with an Apple Watch, with an iPhone, or with a plain NFC sticker, one of those little tags you hold against a reader. That way even someone without a phone can get in.
The whole thing talks to Home Assistant, the open-source software that runs my house, so the lock is not an isolated gadget but part of the rest of the setup.
Why I Stopped Using Smart Bulbs
Smart bulbs look like the easy entry into home automation. Screw them in, install an app, done — that is the promise.
In practice they have a weak spot that nobody mentions on the box, and once you notice it, it is hard to unsee. I go through it in this short clip.
My take after living with them: for most rooms there are better places to put the intelligence than into the bulb itself.
A Few Honest Words About The Toniebox
The Toniebox has been part of our kids’ daily routine for a while now, and I have some thoughts about it that go beyond the usual review.
There are things it does very well and things I would change, and both are worth saying out loud if you are thinking about buying one.
This is my personal take from living with it, not a sponsored verdict.
Connecting A Cosmo Eco Ventilation Unit
A ventilation unit runs quietly in the background all day, which makes it a good candidate for automation — if you can talk to it at all.
Here I look at a Cosmo Eco Air unit and the question of how to get it into Home Assistant, the open-source system I use to bring all my devices under one roof.
Manufacturer systems like this rarely offer an obvious route, so the first step is always figuring out what interface actually exists.
Controlling The House From My Apple Watch
The watch on my wrist turns out to be one of the handiest remote controls in the house, and hardly anyone uses it that way.
Paired with Home Assistant — the open software that runs my smart home — it does a lot more than show notifications. I show what that looks like in everyday use.
The nice part is not the technology but the distance saved: no phone to pull out, no app to hunt for.
Keeping Track Of A Laptop At Home
Laptops have a talent for ending up in the wrong room. A smart home can help with that, because it already knows quite a bit about where things are.
In this clip I go through how tracking a device works with the help of Home Assistant, the software I use to tie my gear together, and what you need for it.
It is a small convenience, but the kind that quietly removes a recurring annoyance from the day.
Turning AirTags Into Automation Triggers
An AirTag is normally just a finder for lost keys. But the moment your house knows where that tag is, it can act on it.
I show how to bring those little trackers into Home Assistant, the open-source hub for my smart home, and use their position to start automations.
From there it is up to your imagination which routine should fire when a certain item arrives or leaves.
A Camera That Reads My Water Meter
Old mechanical meters have no digital output at all. My workaround is a small camera that simply looks at the dial and reads the numbers itself.
The recognition runs directly on the little device instead of somewhere in the cloud, and the result lands in Home Assistant, the software I use to collect all my house data.
The same trick works for a gas meter. Suddenly a decades-old counter delivers readings you can chart.
Fixing A Neighbour’s Ventilation Unit Cheaply
My neighbour’s Zehnder ventilation unit had stopped working and only showed an error on its display.
The cause turned out to be the sensor that measures outdoor temperature and humidity: it had corroded. Not a board failure, not a control problem — one worn part.
We found a detailed tutorial online, worked through it, and the unit ran again afterwards. A repair well below the cost of calling out a technician.
Battery LED Strips Without The Batteries
Those cheap LED strips that run on batteries are handy until the batteries die, which they always do at the worst moment.
I rebuilt mine to run from mains power and added a small controller flashed with ESPHome — free firmware that lets a tiny chip talk to a home automation system.
Now the strip shows up in Home Assistant like any other lamp: switchable, schedulable, and free of the battery drawer forever.
Which Smart Home Protocol Fits Which Job
Zigbee, WiFi, Ethernet, Thread, Matter, Bluetooth Low Energy — the list of ways devices can talk to each other is long and the names say little about what they are good for.
I walk through them and sort them by use case instead of by spec sheet: what suits a battery sensor, what belongs on a cable, what makes sense for a device that only reports occasionally.
Picking the right one at the start saves a lot of rework later, because swapping the radio standard usually means swapping the hardware too.
Making An Old Analogue Intercom Open The Door
We have one of those classic analogue video intercoms next to the front door — a device from a time long before apps.
A door opener I can trigger from my phone or from an automation has been on my list for ages, so I started digging into how this old unit actually works inside.
This clip shows the first results of that analysis: what signals are there, and where a self-built addition could reasonably hook in.
An Automatic TV Timer For The Kids
Screen time discussions used to happen every single evening in our house. Now the house handles it instead of us.
As soon as the Apple TV goes on, a timer starts running in the background. When the kids’ daily budget is used up, the TV switches off by itself — no reminder, no argument about whether it has been an hour already.
In our house this rule has one very happy supporter and two rather unhappy ones. I will let you guess which is which.
Looking Back At A Year Of Projects
The end of the year is a good moment to line up everything that got built, fixed or rewired over the past twelve months.
This clip is that recap: a quick run through the projects around the house, from small repairs to the bigger automation experiments.
Thanks to everyone who followed along. There is plenty left on the workbench for next year.
When A Closed API Broke My Garage Automations
Chamberlain shut off external access to their MyQ system, and with it my garage door automations stopped working. Honestly, I was pretty annoyed.
It is the classic downside of cloud-dependent hardware: the device in your garage is fine, but someone else’s decision switches off half its usefulness.
There is a way out though. A small board called ratgdo connects to the opener directly and brings it back into Home Assistant locally, without any cloud in between. Plenty of people are affected, so I expect a wait before mine arrives.
Repairing A Baby Monitor That Stopped Charging
Our Philips Avent baby monitor refused to charge, so I opened it up before considering a replacement.
Inside, everything looked healthy apart from the micro USB socket, which wobbled loosely in its place. Desoldering such a connector cleanly is fiddly work.
So I took the pragmatic route and wired the power supply straight to the battery input instead. It now only runs plugged in — which is fine, because it sits on the nightstand next to an outlet anyway.
Dishwasher Tabs That Reorder Themselves
Running out of dishwasher tabs is one of those small household failures that nobody notices until the machine is already loaded. I automated it away.
A plug with power measurement tells the system when the dishwasher is actually running. When the cycle ends, everyone gets a push and a spoken notification that it can be emptied, and a counter of remaining tabs ticks down by one.
Once fewer than four tabs are left, an extra notification goes out to the household. Home Assistant handles the whole chain, so the shopping list stays current without anyone thinking about it.
My First Time Setting Up A Matter Device
Matter is the newer standard meant to let smart home gear from different brands work together instead of each needing its own app.
I finally had a device to try it with and connected it through Home Assistant. This clip is my honest first impression of how that went.
The interesting question with any new standard is not whether it works in a demo, but whether the setup is genuinely simpler than what we had before.
My Channel Logo As A Printed Object
A logo normally only exists as pixels on a screen. I wanted to know what mine looks like as a physical object you can actually pick up and turn around in your hand.
So I prepared the shape for printing and let the machine run. Between most of my smart home builds, a print like this is a nice change of pace: no wiring, no software, just a shape and some plastic.
It sits on the desk now. Curious what you make of the result.
