Tips for Smart Home Novices
To be completely honest with you all, I started this to try and help people. I want to try to make Smart Homes more accessible for all people. But realistically, aren't smart homes accessible enough?
Home Assistant now offer the Home Assistant Green, which is a 'Plug and Play' option, and this is brilliant at making Home Assistant more Accessible, but I think the Raspberry Pi with a nice clean case looks more presentable. Especially if you do not have ethernet access in somewhere that can be hidden slightly.
I would say that the main resources I used when starting out would've been 'Everything Smart Home' & the Home Assistant Native guides. But I still must've spent hours and hours trying to get it to work. It was a running joke between me and my wife when I was first starting on our smart home that Home Assistant would just break. She would quite often say "Home Assistant is broken again". This was definitely said a few times a week, if not daily. But after hours of tinkering, reading the guides, community articles and trial and error. I have now got to the point where my Home Assistant makes our lives so much easier. And the best bit of having my Smart Home, is it is mine. It can be as complicated or as simple as I want. From having a Zigbee Motion Sensor turning my lights on for me, to having it so that my lights automatically get warmer and warmer based on the LUX level when the lighting is turned off (see the Article "How a Smart Home can help your sleep").
But after my hours, and hours of working on smart homes, I wanted to help other people. There are so many creators out there who are really innovative and are sharing help and guides. And I want to join them on helping people Smart Homes come true.
We have made a Smart Home Beginner Shopping List free if you join the newsletter, because we want people to get the help they need on starting their smart homes. This shopping list shows you the basics you need, and some devices we have tested and recommend. Using other peoples guides, you can set your smart home up simply. However, if you do not know where or how to start, feel free to get in contact and we have many options on how we can help you setup your Smart Homes.
If you want to learn how to build your smart home on your own, I cannot recommend Lewis' (everythingsmarthome) videos on YouTube enough. As without them, I would never have been able to make my dreams of a smart home come true.
Links:
How a Smart Home can Help you Sleep
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