Home Automation

Mosquitto (or MQTT) is an open source message broker you can use to enable communication between devices, enabling your smart home to communicate with a wider range of devices.

A Smart Home contains many moving parts, and monitoring them can be a hassle. When one of those moving parts stops, your Smart Home can quickly become a Dumb Home.

It's been a busy month for Amazon, announcing two new products to the Alexa line-up. The Echo Look, a smart camera that can judge your fashion sense, and a Jetsons style video call device called the Echo Show. The big surprise though came from the Echo Show, which

I love the idea of everything in my home being able to communicate with each other. Thanks to Home Assistant I already have a lot of things talking to each other.

Sesame by Candy House is Kickstarter Smart Lock that aims to convert any old deadbolt into a smart internet connected lock. Launched in February 2015, Candy House launched their Kickstarter Campaign on the promise that mass-production had already started, and backers would have the Sesame Smart Lock in their hands

Almost a year ago, I wrote about my J.A.R.V.I.S inspired morning wake-up announcement with CastleOS. Since then, I've moved to Home Assistant and sadly, lost my morning announcements.

Home Assistant is a free, open source program for Home Automation. In this guide, I'm going to show you how to install it using Docker on a Synology NAS, with full compatibility with z-wave and network discovery.

I used CastleOS in my apartment for about three months. After constant crashing, my morning weather script not speaking every morning, and an extremely slow development timeframe, it was time to move somewhere else. So where does one go from here? The CastleHUB Kickstarter set me back $400. Not to

This post is part of a series of my thoughts on CastleOS and the CastleHUB. If you haven't already, you should check out my initial thoughts here . The following is my opinion, and Your Mileage May Vary. CastleOS claims it has one of the most powerful scripting languages