Smart Home Archives - The Budget Smart Home

Real-time optimisation of evaporative air conditioners using Home Assistant

Daniel MasonJan 7, 2021January 7, 20210

Evaporative airconditioners work by pulling outside air through wet sponges to reduce the air temperature before venting this air into the building. This is made possible by the cooling effects of evaporation and is goverened

Monitor your Smart Home to improve reliability

Daniel MasonNov 3, 2020March 6, 20230

As the complexity of your smart home increases, its important to implement some kind of system monitoring to ensure long term reliability and stability of the different components that make up the system. When integration

Why interacting with computers is so frustrating

Daniel MasonJun 22, 2020November 1, 20200

A human-computer interface (HC interface) is an attempt to allow humans to communicate with computers in a way that is as natural as possible for the human. This can be done in many ways, though

Voice control for Home Automation

Daniel MasonJun 9, 2020March 28, 20230

Voice control is an extremely powerful way to use technology. Every body can use it and there is next to no learning curve required. How does it work? When we ask our virtual assistants to

Best 433Mhz Wall Touch Panels for Home Automation RF 433MHz Review

Daniel MasonMar 5, 2020March 5, 20230

In this post I want to make some recommendations for affordable RF wall switch panels you can integrate into your home automation system.

Flash Tasmota firmware to Brilliant Smart bulbs with Tuya Convert

Daniel MasonJan 18, 2020March 5, 20230

This post shows how to flash a cheap Smart bulb from Officeworks from start to finish using Tuya Convert and Raspberry Pi.

How to calibrate Home Assistant Sensors

Daniel MasonJan 10, 2019March 5, 20230

To calibrate my temperature and humidity sensors, I placed them inside a glass jar and calibrated each one to match their collective average value.

A complete Guide to Motion Lighting in Smart Homes – Introducing AppDaemon

Daniel MasonMay 17, 2018March 5, 20230

I have previously proposed a motion lighting implementation and discussed some of the problems Home Assistant's YAML based configuration creates for people who are used to the flexibility of fully fledged, battle-tested, object-oriented programming languages.

The Real Motivation behind Home Automation

Daniel MasonDec 6, 2017March 5, 20230

When it comes to my home automation set up there are a few reactions I get. Most people enthusiastically engage and ask questions, showing genuine interest. Others politely—and rather awkwardly—ignore the fact that my table

Network Adapter Settings for Maximizing throughput

Daniel MasonNov 9, 2016March 5, 20230

Advanced ethernet adapter driver settings are extremely configurable finding sensible values can be tricky without testing the connection. This post explains what each setting means and lists recommended values that will maximise your home network's