Smart Home

Smart Home

Analog CO₂ Sensor with a Vintage Gauge Needle, ESP32, and Tasmota

A DIY smart home CO₂ monitor built inside a repurposed IKEA alarm clock, using a SenseAir S8 sensor and an automotive stepper motor to drive an analog needle gauge — all running on Tasmota firmware with custom Berry scripts and a hand-soldered PCB.

Smart Home

A Clean Break with Alice: Building a Fully Local and Private Voice Assistant

How to replace Yandex Alice with a fully offline voice assistant built on Home Assistant, Whisper, Piper, and ESP32 hardware — three implementation options ranging from 1,400 to 20,000+ rubles, with complete architecture diagrams.

Smart Home

How I Rebuilt My Smart Home Five Times — And Threw Out Half the Stuff

A practical account of building and iterating on a DIY smart home system five times over, discovering what automations actually matter and throwing out half the unnecessary ones.

Smart Home

I Won't Connect My Dishwasher to Your Stupid Cloud

A frustrated owner discovers that essential features of his new Bosch dishwasher require mandatory cloud connectivity through the Home Connect app, sparking a broader discussion about IoT design, planned obsolescence, and the local-first principle.

Smart Home

Eyes Don't See, But Hands Do: A Blind Engineer's Experience

A blind-from-birth engineer shares his decades-long journey building a full smart home system using Wiren Board controllers and Modbus, proving that visual impairment is no barrier to complex home automation.