About

Three years ago we bought our first house and since then I’ve been filling it with tech. I ran a load of ethernet cables and have an enterprise grade home network, installed a wall mounted TV with hidden cables, Dolby Atmos surround sound and smart lighting courtesy of a Hue system. I’ve dabbled with home automation using Smartthings but generally found the device and experience both lacklustre and unreliable. This blog records my journey of taking things into my own hands and making our ‘smart’ home a truly autonomous one.

I’ll be building a replacement for the smartthings hub using a raspberry pi and open source software called openhab, as well as building new sensors and actuators where needed, I’ll try to future proof the system as much as possible and make sure it’s robust and reliable, hopefully without any single point of failure.

I’ll also be upgrading my home cinema setup to support HDR and 4K, and upgrading my Atmos system with extra height channels.