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Systems, automation, and real-world tech. Each post ends with what the measurement actually showed.
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2026
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latest 15 September 2026 smart home
Home Assistant Green and the Atomberg Fans
Three fans onto Home Assistant in under five minutes, using a community plugin from HACS. The setup was the easy part. The decision it makes you take first, Atomberg's cloud or an IR blaster, is the one worth thinking about.
Read the note → what it showed fans on the system 3 minutes, start to finish <5 fan speeds, boost included 6
Archive
2026 1 August 2026 Home Network Update: PoE Switch and In-Wall APs I've been adding smart home devices for a while and the network was quietly becoming the bottleneck. So I surveyed the house before buying anything else. Here's what the heatmaps showed and what one access point actually fixed. home network 24 June 2026 Six Months with the Aqara A100 129 days after installing it the batteries died and every way into my house died with them. Fingerprint, NFC, watch, app, all useless at once. What got me in was a powerbank ordered off Instamart and a USB-C port nobody ever reviews. smart home 5 May 2026 Getting Started with Home Assistant and Aqara Every device I'd bought answered to a different company's servers. Home Assistant is how I pulled that back in, running on a second hand mini PC that costs less than one of the switches it controls. smart home 1 May 2026 Why I Chose Aqara for My Home I spent months talking myself into Zigbee, then bought three Wi-Fi devices on purpose. How I ended up on Aqara for a hundred-device house, and where the clean story leaks. smart home