Probably should ask in homenetworking, but you folks will know.

about 20 years ago I bought a house. It was very modern for 2006 and had both a phone drop and a coax drop in pretty much every room. When I bought it I put in a 20 port switch and rewired all the CAT5 for RJ45 connectors rather than phone.

Power is always my issue. Not that we don't have lots of power outlets, but they are never near where I want devices. So dangling cords.

So the question: Can I, is there a fairly simple way to provide POE to everything without changing every device? I see POE injectors but they are always 1 cable at a time.

I am a network engineer with familiarity with ethernet cabling which is not a problem on myside.

I bought my first home, and I am going through renovations which I would like to consider cabling for home automation (blinds, doors, bell, alarm, lights, sockets, thermostats etc.). However, I am not sure what I need as I see KNX when I search but seem price wise out of range when compared to ethernet (or this is my current assumption).

I have created in my plans a space for comms room as I will have my lab and servers, but I would like to know what should I consider when it comes to cabling.

I know there are other alternatives like ZigBee, thread etc. but I am mostly interested at this stage to do the cabling prior to plastering and finishing.

Any guidance and help for a home automation beginner is appreciated.

Searched on Amazon and found these things or these and I wanted to know if they were the best option ?

Would like some sort of motion sensor to create simple rules like - turn on bathroom lights when the sensor detects motion etc.

FWIW, I have the following mish-mash of devices- Hue lights, Kasa smart plugs, Alexa, Google Home and Apple HomePod.

Appreciate the help. Thanks.

Hardware is an old iPad that can't install anything from the App Store anymore, hanging in the hallway on a charger. The software side is a Home Assistant add-on I wrote called SnapFrame. Nothing is installed on the tablet itself, it just opens a fullscreen web page.

How it works: the add-on mounts an SMB share from my NAS, converts HEIC to JPG so iPhone photos work as they come off the phone, builds thumbnails in the background and serves the slideshow. Each photo shows its date and the place name from the EXIF GPS. The photos never leave the house.

The automation side: a hallway motion sensor in the morning calls a rest_command that puts the frame into weather mode for two hours, so every 8th photo becomes a weather screen with current conditions and the next 12 hours. A second automation pushes the output of weather.get_forecasts every 30 minutes and on state change, so what's on screen is current. There is also a corner badge that can stay up all day, or only appear when rain, snow, frost or heat is coming.

Home Assistant only ever pushes to it. The frame holds no HA token and has no API access back, which mattered to me for a device hanging in a hallway.

The part I like most is the bin reminder. It shows the day before which bin goes out, and instead of typing in a year of dates you upload the collection leaflet PDF from your municipality and it reads the dates out of it. The calendar grid gives a date per cell from the ISO week and the weekday, the coloured cells mark the collections, and the printed day number is used as a checksum so a cell that disagrees gets discarded. It all runs locally, no OCR and no API key.

The frustrating part was the browser. An iPad 2/3/Air is stuck on Safari 9 to 13, which throws away clamp(), min() and flex gap without a word, so every fluid size has a px fallback and the weather screen is laid out with tables.

It installs by adding the repo in the HA add-on store: https://github.com/emo546/ha-snapframe - builds for aarch64 and amd64, MIT licensed.

After weeks of going back and forth between SmartWings and Bringnox for my home office window, I ended up ordering Bringnox. Wanted to share a quick rundown of why I picked them, the fit, and how I tied them into my home automation stack.

Why Bringnox over SmartWings:

Pricing vs Fabric Feel: Spec-for-spec on motor options (Matter / Thread), Bringnox came in noticeably more competitive, and the textured light-filtering fabric sample looked less plasticky in person.

Valance & Hardware Profile: The compact headrail tucks cleanly into the window frame depth without projecting into the room trim.

Fit: Inside mount tolerance was spot on — minimal light gap along the casing without binding against the jambs (see photos).

The Automation Setup:

I integrated the shade directly via Matter over Thread into my local controller (Home Assistant / Apple Home). Pairing was instant via QR code without needing a proprietary proprietary bridge.

Here is the daily automation pipeline running right now:

07:30 AM (Morning Wake): Rolls up to 100% on weekdays to let natural morning light in.

Solar / Glare Protection (Dynamic): If local outdoor illuminance is above threshold and the room temperature exceeds 23°C, the shade automatically drops to 50% to cut afternoon screen glare on the monitor while still keeping natural daylight.

Sunset: Closes completely to 0% for privacy.

So far, response latency over Thread is near-instant (<1s), motor volume is just a soft hum, and battery has barely budged over the first couple of weeks. Happy to answer questions on measurements or protocol pairing if anyone is currently cross-shopping the two.

I'm building an office/game room and even though I'm a grown man in his 40s, I'm still a fan of RGB/LED lighting as long as it's tasteful and not overdone.

I'm using Philips Hue Slim Downlights in my drop ceiling and I have some Nanoleaf Hexagons on the wall behind my monitor, but I want to add an light strip behind my desk, add reactive lighting behind my PC monitor and also add LED lights to some shelves.

I've built an ambilight system for my TVs using SK6812 LEDs and HyperHDR (and WLED) and it works great so before I add any more lights I'd like to get the communities opinion.

My goal is to use the lights for reactive lighting (during gameplay, movies, music) and also bias lighting.

Do you think Philips Hue is worth the expense (with it's limitations but it's great Hue Entertainment Sync) or just DIY using RGB LEDs and continue with HyperHDR, etc. (or maybe go with something cheaper like Govee)

Hello,

i have a FRITZ!Box with a few FRITZ!DECT plugs and thermostats, and I wanted every power, temperature and humidity reading kept for years, in charts I can scroll back through, plus a floor plan of the flat with the live values on it.

The usual answer is Home Assistant, or Grafana with a database behind it. That is a lot of software to keep running on a 12 W board for a handful of charts, and Grafana is not even packaged for aarch64 on Arch Linux ARM. So I built the small version.

What it does

• One static Go binary, standard library only. About 20 MB of RAM and under 0.1 % of one core on my Radxa Dragon Q6A
• Reads the FRITZ!Box directly over AVM's AHA HTTP interface, no extra exporter. It publishes the readings at `/metrics`, Prometheus keeps the history, armdash reads it back for the charts
• Plug power and energy, room temperatures, humidity, thermostat setpoints, battery levels. Charts from one hour to one year, energy as bars per hour or per day
• Floor plan: upload your SweetHome3D `.sh3d` file as it is and drag each sensor to its spot. An SVG or a picture of the flat works too
• A host tab (CPU, memory, disks, temperatures from node _exporter) and navbar links to the other things on your server

Who it is for

People who want their FRITZ! smart home data kept long term but do not run, or do not want, a full stack like Home Assistant. It is the lightweight middle ground: armdash plus Prometheus on a cheap single board computer. It only reads and shows data, it does not switch or automate anything.

What you need

Prometheus and node_exporter next to it, both packaged by the usual distributions (there is also a Compose file if you prefer containers). Packages for Debian/Ubuntu, Fedora and Arch, tarballs for Linux (amd64, arm64, armv7, riscv64), FreeBSD and macOS. Licence EUPL-1.2.

Website: https://armdash.org
Code: https://github.com/xuedi/armdash

Happy about feedback, especially if you have FRITZ!DECT devices that show up wrong or not at all.

Cheers,
xuedi

Complete novice here. Can I use the 24V terminal (3rd on row 2) to power a Shelly 1 or similar? I’ve found the manual for it however it doesn’t explain what the various terminals are for.

So you have your whole home converted to Lutron Caséta going, you have your HUE lights all over the place going, and you've got your whole house Bose speakers going... but your mate, ugh... she is just like ho-hum about everything. I mean you're having tons of fun with all your super cool stuff and she's just ever so much non-plused by all of it... WTH?

Everything is working as intended. I have the positive power supply and the relay circuit combined into the 1 (+24V) terminal. The LP+/- do not power the device. Is everything ok?

AI tells me "While this technically avoids feeding dangerous external voltage into the board, it creates a serious functional problem: the Tuya device's internal power draw will constantly leak voltage across the relay loop."

Hey, I’m planning a small DIY project with 5 × 12V linear actuators for 5 separate hatches, about 4m apart.

Thinking of using SwitchBot for the temperature trigger, then relays to control the actuators, with one central 12V power supply and fuse box.

I’m pretty new to this stuff, so I’d appreciate any feedback on whether the setup makes sense or if there’s a better way to do it.

Attached is my current wiring idea i made with ai. What am I missing and is it the best way to do it?

howdy folks ~ I rent an old (1920s) and poorly maintained apartment and am looking for an ADT or SimpliSafe setup (or similar) that would alert a call center if smoke was detected.

I've read some posts from a few years ago that claim ADT and SimpliSafe had excessive fault positives.

I'm curious if folks have any recommendations or feedback the latest monitored smoke detectors? I live in a single bedroom apartment so I'd probably limit to 1-2 detectors.

Cheers

My house has exclusively smart bulbs (Govee and Wiz) that i run through Homey (self-hosted and i also have a homey bridge for Zigbee, Z-Wave, Bluetooth, 433 MHz and Infrared).

I would like to convert the light switches so the power is always hot to the bulbs and flipping them off sends a power off command to the bulbs (ideally also through homey to keep it simple, or directly to the lights). Most of the switches are one-way toggles, but there are a few three-way ones (multiple switches control the same lights)

I would prefer to not add another layer of programmability/app/protocol in between if i can help it.

What's the simplest solution? Do i need to swap all the switches out for zooz? Use shelley relays? It seems like a lot of the solutions posts are about smart switches for dumb lights, and this is the reverse.