This Pico-W IoT Starter Project Gets You Into Home Assistant Quick As A Flash

Many of us hacker types with some hardware knowledge and a smattering of embedded experience would like to get into home automation, but there can be quite a learning curve. If you’re looking…

ESP8266 Smart Vents Keep Tabs On Home Temps

Have you ever found that, despite having a central heating and air conditioning system, that not all the rooms in your home end up being the temperature you want them to be? Maybe the dining room g…

Easier Self Hosting With Umbrel

While it is undeniable that cloud-based services are handy, there are people who would rather do it themselves. For many of us, it is because we want what we want the way we want it. For others, it…

LoRa Helps With Remote Water Tank Level Sensing

[Renzo Mischianti]’s friend has to keep a water tank topped up. Problem is, the tank itself is 1.5 km away, so its water level isn’t typically known. There’s no electricity availa…

Insteon Gets Another Chance

It would appear that, sometimes, miracles happen. A few days ago, an update graced the website of Insteon, a company whose abrupt shuttering we covered in detail two months ago. An entity described…

Insteon Abruptly Shuts Down, Users Left Smart-Home-Less

In today’s “predictable things that happened before and definitely will happen again”, Insteon, a smart home company boasting the Insteon ecosystem of devices built around their p…

The Virtue Of Wires In The Age Of Wireless

We ran an article this week about RS-485, a noise resistant differential serial multidrop bus architecture. (Tell me where else you’re going to read articles like that!) I’ve had my fun…

Reusing Proprietary Wireless Sockets Without Wireless Hacking

Bending various proprietary devices to our will is a hacker’s rite of passage. When it comes to proprietary wall sockets, we’d often reverse-engineer and emulate their protocol – …

Add Smarts To Your Old Capsule Coffee Maker

Everyone has their preferred method of making (and consuming) coffee. While modern coffee makers are starting to come standard with IoT and ‘smart’ capabilities, owners of older models …

ESP32 Brings Air Purifier Online With Home Assistant

A lot of hackers are rightfully concerned about the privacy issues that surround many of today’s “smart” gadgets, but it’s hard to argue that the ability to remotely control…

Automation Allows You To Leaf Your Plants Alone

The greatest threat to a potted plant stems from its owner’s forgetfulness, but [Sasa Karanovic] has created an automation system that will keep his plants from getting too thirsty. Over the …

Automating Pool Monitoring And Chemical Dosing

Anyone who has had a backyard pool will know that it only takes a little lapsed attention to turn the whole thing green. For those sick of having to stay on top of things, the idea of automating po…

Automated Window Blinds Using MQTT And Home Assistant

Finnish software engineer [Toni] is on a quest to modernize his 1991 house, and his latest project was to automate the window blinds and control them using Home Assistant. Unless your blinds have b…

Home Automation Terminal With Cyberpunk Style

The OLKB-Terminal designed by [Jeff Eberl] doesn’t have a battery, can’t fold up (even if it seems like it could), and is only portable in the sense that you can literally pick it up an…

Samsung Shuttering Original SmartThings Hubs

Samsung is causing much angst among its SmartThings customers by shutting down support for its original SmartThings home automation hub as of the end of June. These are network-connected home autom…

Control An IRL Home From Minecraft

Minecraft seems to be a game in which anything is possible, both in the virtual world and in the real one. As a sandbox-style game, we’ve seen all kinds of things implemented in it including …

Home Automation For Fans Of Quick-and-Dirty Solutions

At Hackaday, we celebrate all kinds of projects, but we’ll have to admit that the polished and professional-looking builds tend to catch our eye a lot more than perhaps they should. There&#82…

DIY Air Quality Sensor

  [Andrew Lamchenko], who has built a number of small e-ink-based sensors this year, released another design called the eON Indoor Air Quality Sensor. As his previous sensor designs, the eON b…

PiNet — One Small Project Grows Unexpectedly

A few years ago, [Gregory Sanders] aka [Dr Gerg] had one simple wish in mind when he started what is now the PiNet project — to know whether his garage door was open or closed. Instead of sea…