home hacks

1908 Articles

Why The Smart Home Bubble Popped

May 21, 2026 by 103 Comments

Circa 2015 or so, it seemed like you couldn’t move a finger without being bombarded with ads and articles about ‘smart homes’ and the ‘internet of things’ — all of which would make our lives so much easier and more automated. Fast-forward a decade and this dream has mostly evaporated along with many of the players in the space. Why this happened is the topic of a recent video by [Caya].

An interesting bit of context that the video starts off with is that home automation really kicked off back in 1975, when the X10 protocol and related devices using power lines for signaling began being sold. These fully integrated solutions generally worked reasonably well, but what all changed when the IoT and ‘smart home’ craze kicked off and brought with it an explosion of new standards.

Over the past decade we have seen the concept of a ‘smart home’ collapse into a nightmare of abandoned IoT devices, subscription services, forced ads, privacy violations, and an increasingly more congested 2.4 GHz spectrum that everything from WiFi and Zigbee to Bluetooth and others ended up competing for, with a corresponding collapse in reliability of data transmissions.

As raised in the video, a big issue is that of the financial viability of running the remote services for a smart home solution, even if this is the part that should make it as plug-and-play as a 1990s-era smart home solution. To the average user setting up their own locally hosted smart home solution isn’t really a straightforward option.

Although at the end [Caya] demonstrates using Home Assistant (HA) as a locally hosted alternative, this is still not something that a non-techie will be able to set up or maintain. Even if you shell out a cool two-hundred clams for the Home Assistant Green plug-and-play hardware solution, the average person will be lost the second any of the prescribed steps in provided documentation do not work. Woe to whoever is the person who is ‘good with computers’ in those cases.

Ultimately another problem with ‘smart homes’ is that they’re really not that smart, as you can definitely set up all kinds of rules in HA and similar solutions, but this is more painstaking manual automation with all the excitement of programming PID controllers. Having an actual intelligence behind the system that could react to what’s happening would make it a far easier sell, yet which is where all the ‘smart assistants’ like Alexa keep falling flat.

Currently [Caya] has set up his HA-based lighting configuration to be used by OpenClaw ‘agentic AI’, as a way to add some actual ‘smarts’, but it’s telling that he hasn’t integrated the smart lock of his apartment into the system yet. Nobody wants to have the OpenClaw agent tell you that it ‘cannot open the front door’ for you, after all.

Continue reading “Why The Smart Home Bubble Popped” →

DecayDock Keeps Track Of Spoilage

May 20, 2026 by 12 Comments

Many of us have suffered the common experience of buying a great deal of (now very expensive) food, only to have it go off before it can be consumed. [ptallthings93] has whipped up a simple device to try and tackle this problem.

The result is DecayDock, which lives on a fridge and tries to keep track of what’s going on inside. It achieves this with the use of an ESP32-CAM module, which combines the capable microcontroller with a camera for image detection work. With the aid of an Edge AI model, it’s able to detect common food items that are held in front of the camera, which are in turn added to an internal inventory. The items are tracked over time based on expected shelf lives, and the freshness of various items in the fridge is displayed on an attached LCD screen with a green/yellow/red color coding system.

The system is only making estimates—it’s not able to actually identify when the cheese has gone moldy or the milk has gone sour. Still, if you struggle to remember what you should be prioritizing to use in your fridge, it might be a handy aid.

Ultimately, we never really saw smart fridges dominate the market, even though the idea has long been a popular one in futurist circles. Perhaps none of them thought that nobody really wants to stand staring down at a screen on the fridge all day. In reality, some areas of the home are best left unsmartified.

Automating Window Shades With Home Assistant

May 14, 2026 by 12 Comments

Most people love window shades, but many dislike the tedium of having to open and close them over the course of each day. While there are automation options here, if you’re in a rental place like [Rooster Robotics], then you’d prefer something less intrusive, as well as less cloud-bound. This is basically why he opted to build his own solution from scratch to open and close roller shades via Home Assistant.

The comments to the video helpfully point out that technically his point about there not being commercial options with a forced remote account ‘feature’ is false, as the Aqara Roller Shade Driver E1 for example is just a regular Zigbee device which can be used with a wide range of home automation ecosystems. That said, it’s always nice to have your own device that you fully control.

Of course, these devices are deceptively simple, as you still have to somehow know how far open the curtain is, which is also useful if you just want to open the curtain a certain amount. The other issue is the need to have the motor parallel with the wall unless you enjoy having a big wart sticking out from the wall.

Solving the first issue was attempted with a Hall effect sensor, and the second with angled gearing. With some refinements this led to a functioning design, allowing the development of a custom PCB with an ESP32-S3 module for WiFi control. In the final design the Hall effect sensor and magnets were replaced with an AS5600 magnetic rotatory position sensor that requires just one magnet and offers a much higher resolution.

Currently the design files are not available, but [Rooster Robotics] has indicated that they are looking at open sourcing the files in the future.

Continue reading “Automating Window Shades With Home Assistant” →

Could Your Next House Be Built From Giant Lego By An Inchworm Robot?

May 8, 2026 by 24 Comments

Well, it depends when you’re going to be househunting– if it’s anytime soon, Betteridge’s law applies, but if your time horizon is a ways further out, [Miana Smith] at MIT wants to make it happen. She’s got a paper out with an open-source inchworm robot designed to assemble structures from voxels– and what is a voxel but a giant, LEGO-esque brick?

There’s a demo video below, and it’s easier to understand the motion of this thing when you see it in action. The 5 degree-of-freedom MILAbot has actuators on both ends, and no traditional base– that’s the inchworm part. It grabs a brick while anchored to one part of the structure, then stays anchored to the new brick to keep building from that locale, so on and so on.

Note that we’re not talking about concrete bricks here, though conceivably you could use an inchworm-style actuator to assemble those. The ‘voxels’ in the study are engineered space-frame blocks which come together very easily, though admittedly would make for a very drafty home– you’d want to fill them with spray foam as a finishing step. So it’s more of a framing technique than a one-and-done thing. Still it is a technique that has something to recommend it compared to the 3D-printed concrete houses that get so much hype— and are already being torn down. 

For instance, the researchers find that weather the voxels are plywood, PLA, or metal, the resulting structure has less embodied energy than any concrete structure, with 3D printed concrete being worst option by that metric– though the balloon-frame stick-build we in North America consider “conventional” is still the lowest of all. On the other hand, that balloon-frame building takes a crew to put together, and labour is expensive compared to robots. At the moment, however, the study admits balloon-framing wins on price, but that doesn’t mean it always will, and it’s a fun hack regardless.

So while your next house might not be made of LEGO by a robot inchworm, we’re still grateful to [Miana] for the tip.

Most building hacks we see here are of the 3D printed variety, but don’t count out plain old dirt. For that matter, as long as someone is willing to live in it, anything can be a house– even an airliner. Continue reading “Could Your Next House Be Built From Giant Lego By An Inchworm Robot?” →

DIY Electrolysis Machine Removes Hair Permanently

May 7, 2026 by 38 Comments

If you talk to the FDA, there’s only one permanent method of hair removal—electrolysis. This involves sticking a needle into a hair follicle, getting it very hot or running a current through it, and then letting heat and/or the lye generated kill the root of the hair dead. Normally, you’d pay someone with a commercial machine to do this for you at great expense. Or, you could do it yourself with a home-built machine, as [n3tcat] did.

Based on the available information out in the wild, [n3tcat] decided to build a galvanic electrolysis machine. This specifically passes current through a needle in the hair follicle to generate lye at the hair bulb, which kills it. The amount of lye generated depends on the amount of current and the time over which it is applied. More lye is more likely to kill a follicle permanently, though there are limits with regards to avoiding scarring, other skin damage, and excessive pain.

Continue reading “DIY Electrolysis Machine Removes Hair Permanently” →

E-paper Dashboard Reimagines Smart Home’s Connection With Technology

May 5, 2026 by 11 Comments

When [Joel Hawksley] and his partner got married, they had a goal to create a home with a healthy relationship to technology, which largely means avoiding smartphone use. Smartphones aren’t without their benefits, though, like being clocks and calendars, so [Joel] started looking for other options to replace these capabilities. At first he went with a “magic mirror” solution, but quickly pivoted to a wall-mounted e-paper solution he calls Timeframe which has evolved into a respectable overview for his home and life.

E-paper has a number of advantages over LCD and LED displays, one of which being that its resemblance to real paper makes it feel more organic. The first e-paper iterations of Timeframe used multiple displays in wooden frames, and [Joel] had a few different ones stationed around the house. They received their data from a custom-built Rails backend which sent pictures to the devices. This made the refresh rate possible fairly low, but a new 23.5″ display from Boox eventually enabled an acceptably high resolution and refresh rate which could support more traditional display uses. But this display required that [Joel] rewrite the entire back-end, an effort that took quite a bit of time but resulted in an impressive final product.

Like any custom-built project like this, [Joel] still has plans for improvements including those around further integration with his Home Assistant and reducing costs for future platforms. E-paper displays are popular pieces of technology for home dashboards like this, in the past we’ve seen similar, smaller builds which coincidentally have the same name.

IR Device Control That Lives Off The Cloud

May 2, 2026 by 4 Comments

There are lots of smart home systems that will let you blast your older dumb appliances with infrared to control them. However, many are tied to ugly cloud systems that can frustrate you on a regular basis. [Steelcuts] whipped up a cloudless solution to this problem instead.

IR2MQTT does pretty much exactly what it says in the name. It allows integrating things like air conditioners and televisions into a Home Assistant setup with the use of an IR blaster and a neat, tidy web app. You use it with an ESP32 or ESP8266 running a firmware based on ESPHome to actually do the IR blasting. In turn, IR2MQTT is a back-end plus a web interface that lets you setup all your IR devices without having to manually capture IR codes and create YAML files to do everything. It’s also integrated with large databases of IR codes for common appliances so in many cases, you can just look up your gear and get it working the easy way.

Sometimes all you need to get the job done is an IR LED and the will to use it. If you’re cooking up your own infrared hacks, don’t hesitate to let us know on the tipsline.