Which animal best describes your home automation?

(Inspired by: Annika Sabrina Schulz, Yara Youssef, Frank Beruscha, and Eva Hornecker. 2024. User Perceptions and Experiences with Smart Homes - The Smart Home as an Obedient Guard Dog, Disinterested Cat, Ambitious Octopus or Busy Beehive. In Proceedings of Mensch und Computer 2024 (MuC '24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 171–183. https://doi.org/10.1145/3670653.3670659)

#HomeAutomation

Dreame NAVO Smart Lock A10 and Safio Turbo Lite bring fingerprint and Apple Home access to your front door

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://nerds.xyz/2026/04/dreame-smart-locks/

A little late today owing to much business, here's my #Hackster article round-up - starting with the launch of ESPHome 2026.4.0, with big performance gains for ESP32 devices!

...by setting the CPU clock to 240MHz instead of 160MHz, so if you're running it on a battery-powered device maybe toggle that in the config.

https://www.hackster.io/news/esphome-2026-4-0-brings-a-big-performance-boost-for-the-espressif-esp32-with-breaking-changes-too-006b26e1b445

#Technology #News #Hackster #HomeAutomation

I'm trying to get my friend started with a smart home and I'm really struggling with what to recommend for a mesh network. On the one hand Zigbee seems to be incredibly mature and reliable, but it requires a hub. On the other hand, Thread seems nice because it only needs border routers which can be distributed, but the devices are more expensive and seem to be less reliable.

I really want to keep to Matter as much as possible because I love the multi-admin mode, so I'm torn. My friend is getting into Home Assistant, but his husband really likes using their Google Home speakers, so I want to be able to put devices into both. Basically, my options are:

1) Get Matter over Thread devices.
2) Get a Zigbee hub that supports Matter.
3) Use Home Assistant as a Zigbee hub and use Matterbridge.

I'd love some thoughts or feedback if anyone has any, or maybe some options I missed. ​

#HomeAssistant #HomeAutomation #Matter #Thread #Zigbee #Mesh