Sonoff Mini vs. Shelly1 – Tiny Smart Switch Battle

At our house, we use Alexa a lot. In fact, we have an Echo Dot in almost every room. Alexa has been great at controlling our smart home devices. But we also listen to a lot of music. Until recently we couldn’t use home assistant to play music through the amazon echo. But now thanks…

So you’ve got Hassio up and running.  You’ve probably got a few smart switches and lights, maybe some sensors and even presence detection.  Now the real magic in Home Automation is getting all those smart devices to work together to make your house feel alive.  With Home Assistant you can do that with automations or…

I play video games. I started with Atari and Intellivision and now it’s xbox and even a little Oculus VR. The games have become so good it is often hard to stop playing. If we don’t set limits it is easy for kids to spend too much time playing. But parents are busy, and aren’t…

Besides just showing off the awesome stuff you can do with home automation, we’re using the Maker Faire display to demonstrate a few different situations that have come up in questions and comments on previous videos. First, let’s look at a light switch wiring situation from my first “sonoff-as-a-light-switch” video. When I was explaining different…

  Wouldn’t it be great to have a custom UI that would show all your smart home devices laid out on a floorplan of your house. So with just a glance you could see which lights are on, which doors are open, or where there are people moving around?  Of course you’d also want to…