Home Automation

Handy Dandy list of Essential Home Automation Hardware

A continuously updated list of essential hardware for your Home Automation projects. The goal is to list inexpensive, open and quality hardware here.

Fabio Bier

02 Jan 2020 — 1 min read

Below I will maintain an updated list of essential hardware for your Home Automation projects. The goal is to list inexpensive, open and quality hardware here.

The very basics

Raspberry Pi 4B [Available here]
Class A2 MircoSD Card [Available here]
Believe me, you really want class A2 for this since we'll be generating A LOT of write cycles and if will fry your regular class SD Card within a few months leaving you in the dark (happened to me more than three times at a very bad time)
USB ZigBee Debugger (CC2531)
ZigBee based smart bulbs like Philips Hue or Ikea Tradfri

Sensors sensors sensors!

Xiaomi who is a very well known and big tech hardware company from China has a daughter brand called Aqara. After owning and working with many Aqara producs I can promise you these devices are incredible value for money. I will list some of the products I have first-hand experience with.

Aqara Human Body Sensor
Aqara Temperature and Humidity sensor

Harden Android privacy and security with GrapheneOS

Regular Android devices when up-to-date with the latest security patches are quite secure to a certain degree. However when it comes to privacy it's definitely not great. A lot can be configured to be more robust and less permissive though the granularity is very limited. When it comes

How to install Minecraft in Linux the easy way

The secret to installing Minecraft the easy way is to use a third-party launcher/manager like Prism Launcher. First make sure you have the latest version of Java and the Flatpak runtime installed on your Linux system. You can check this by running the following commands in a terminal: java

RGB Delight on Linux: We can have nice things too!

There's no doubt about it, the latest NZXT cases like the H7 Flow are absolutely amazing from both a performance and aesthetics point of view. However why have a tempered glass window in your case if there's nothing nice to look at inside right? You want

Speed up your Virtual machines with Qemu

If you're into Virtual Machines for whatever reason at all there's a big chance you've been using Virtualbox and are quite happy with it. I was the same until I saw this YouTube video by ChrisTitusTech. This post will be mostly based off of