You're going to be quiet and come with
me right now because I'm going to show you the seven wonders of the modern smart home. If you haven't noticed creating the ultimate smart home has nothing to do with
Google or Apple or Amazon anymore. It's all to do with free, open-source solutions that you can't live without. This
video could save you thousands. These are absolutely amazing wonders that interconnect together and allow you
to achieve pretty much anything, from photo frames that act as
calendars when you need them to smart ornaments that tell you
how your solar system is doing to interactive lighting controls to smart paintings that
set the scene for the room. Adding them to your toolkit will let you
unlock pretty much everything in your house, and most importantly get rid of
those stupid manufacturer apps. And they're all free. With one exception,
which I will argue is even better than free, but wait and see if I can convince you. So without further ado let's begin. The first wonder is Home Assistant. This helps you control all of the smart
gadgets in your home from one place. Home Assistant is an extraordinary piece of software. It's free. It's
powerful. And open source. It's a home automation platform that puts local
control and privacy first, supporting basically every device that you can think of across any
brand, without the need for cloud dependency. In the same way everyone now googles for
a real search result by adding "Reddit" at the end of their search, I now buy items for
the home with "Home Assistant" at the end. If it hasn't been integrated,
which is rare, then it's a no no. You can install home assistant
on pretty much any device, from a Raspberry Pi to a PC. Or you can just
buy a pre-built device that does it all for you. Either way, it's cheap, totally
customisable and open source. You name it. it's got it: voice
control, smart web interface, app control and thousands and thousands of
integrations for everything you can think of. These guys deserve a Nobel prize for the work they've done for humanity! And
it's constantly improving too. I have a little moment every
time they release a new version. So we've got a brain, but we need sensors
to trigger events in our smart home. That's where we come to the second wonder, a true jewel of the maker world:
the ESP 32 microcontroller. The ESP32 is like a tiny brain that you can connect all your sensors to for
all of your DIY smart projects. This dinky powerhouse makes it super easy
to build your own little devices to sensor, monitor and control devices all around the home. I love him so much! So cute! There are millions of great
videos out there with people demonstrating their innovations using these. People use them to control
just about everything. They can also be used to turn non-smart devices smart. These chips are super cheap and will cost
just a few pounds or dollars each and have low power usage. This suddenly unlocks your
ability to fill your house with smart devices. The ecosystem around this is developing
every day. There are some smart all-in-one sensors starting to pop up that will
push things even further as well. Imagine having a device in a room that can monitor
temperature, noise levels, air quality, movement, light levels, humidity and more. The mind boggles
with the cool stuff that you could achieve! So you've got home assistant as
your brain and ESP 32 chips ready to sense, but you're not much of an
electronics engineer. Well fear not! This is where the third wonder comes in: ESPHome. ESPHome makes it easy to tell
those tiny ESP32 brains what to do without you having to be a programmer. It acts as a simple intermediary
between Home Assistant and every one of your ESP devices. It handles everything. You can find hundreds of guides on
their site that cover how to wire up basically any component and you can
just plug in wires and you're away. It has super simple code that you can copy, paste and tweak to suit your use case, and
it sorts out all the wireless connectivity, over-the-air firmware upgrades and
everything that you could think of. It's completely free, with an awesome community
all working to make the smart world cooler. It seamlessly integrates into Home Assistant also, so suddenly your brain is picking
up the nervous system of your house. Now whilst everything can connect
by Wi-Fi that I've covered I now should introduce the fourth wonder: Zigbee2MQTT. Zigbee2MQTT lets different smart
devices talk to each other. Very quickly Zigbee is a popular wireless
communication standard used in many smart home devices, primarily driven by its low power
consumption and mesh networking capabilities. So it can communicate by bouncing
from one device to the next. MQTT is a classic nerd name: Message
Queuing Telemetry Transport. But in essence it's a lightweight messaging protocol. You almost certainly have Zigbee devices in
your house: your smart bulbs, smart plugs, door window sensors and motion sensors,
temperature and humidity sensors, smart thermostats, smoke and carbon
monoxide detectors and loads more. This provides super fast responsive
triggering of all these devices. In fact I actually find that lights switch on
much faster using this than the native apps, which are usually bouncing off
some cloud some server somewhere. And yes it integrates
wonderfully with Home Assistant. Okay so we have all our devices either
integrated directly into Home Assistant or using Z2M to connect. We have lots of custom
sensors appearing using ESP32s and ESPHome. We now need to free ourselves from opening
our phones, unlocking and loading apps. You can use the Home Assistant,
which is great as you can put everything in one place and design
it to perfectly suit your use case. However sometimes you don't
want to even have to do that. There is a broad ecosystem of
smart buttons you can buy. IKEA TRÅDFRI ones that I use which are pretty
cheap, however there is a cost limit and a visual limit to how many buttons
you want to litter about your house. This is where a super cheap and invisible
solution comes in. So the fifth wonder costs literally pennies, usually around
just 5p or a few cents per tag. I'm talking about the RFID tag. Just look
at this thing! It's an amazing tool to have. RFID tags contain a tiny radio frequency
transponder, radio receiver and transmitter that can be embedded in something like a simple
sticker. When you hold a reader near them, such as your phone, they can trigger actions,
like turning on lights or unlocking doors. You can buy them as sticky labels, like this one
or printable credit-card-style plastic key tags or anything that you can imagine. They require
no batteries of course and they last forever. They really are a brilliant invention that
I'll need to do a whole video on one day. They most famously were used by the
Soviets to spy on the Americans, but these days they're ubiquitous
in asset tracking, payment systems, secure entry, library tracking, airport
baggage handling and loads more. You can control them using a dedicated reader
or just use your phone or any smart device. Think about this: there are loads of
things that we'd do if we could just be bothered. For example, wouldn't
it be nice whenever you got home you could just set the lights to evening
mode and turn on some relaxing music. But you don't do you, because let's go through
the steps: open your phone, open the Hue app, set the lighting level, close
the app, open the Sonos app, choose the speaker sets, select the
playlist, hit play, adjust the volume level. Oh it's just not going to happen is it. You just want to drop your phone down and relax. But that is exactly what you can do for 5p! They add a wonderful sense
of intrigue by their hidden nature. They're just so easy to add
to anything - they're just so thin! I can literally just stick this
under the table and I now have a smart table that I can just tap
with my phone to do something. I can stick it on me and when you tap your phone on me I can can become...I
can become smart.... [Music] ....or just maybe play some music. My dining room has a whole series of
paintings with RFID tags behind them that trigger individual themes
of music: British, American, Italian, whatever I want to match
the kind of food that we're eating. And then from top to bottom
we have three levels of beat: top being upbeat, middle being
normal and bottom being chilled. So I can just tap my phone and the music
magically starts playing whatever playlist I want. So now you can cover your house
with sensors and triggers, however sometimes you need the
devices to communicate to you. And the fastest method known to man is the speed of light. This is where the sixth wonder comes in: WLED. WLED lets you change the colours and
patterns of your lights really easily, so you can then use this to get your
devices to talk to you using light signals. It is a lovely bit of software that lets
you turn basic LED strips into smart, controllable effects powerhouses. Guess what? It uses ESP32s, it works
brilliantly with Home Assistant. But it's just an amazing controller
that connects seamlessly to Home Assistant and lets you program literally
thousands of bespoke lighting effects. It can use flames to show you one thing
and gradients to show you another. Okay we come to the final
wonder. And this is where it gets a bit controversial, but hear me out. I've just saved you thousands and thousands of
pounds. I've made your life so much better and freed you from the grip of dozens of cynical
corporate entities - so basically you owe me. So keep all those thousands for yourself,
but I want you to go and buy yourself a gift. And that gift is a 3D printer. A 3D printer is a device that can create
physical objects from digital designs that you can create yourself or download.
This will let you create custom parts, containers or decorations for your home gadgets. Now 3D printers have amazing
slicers that are completely free, and my shout would be the brilliant Orca
slicer that is fighting the increasing closed-box mentality of the printer makers. But you will need to buy a printer
to use them. I would be astonished if the actual cost of your 3D printer
wasn't essentially free within 6 months. They pay for themselves so quickly. For me it was all those shelf brackets that I would have paid for for my Sonos speakers, the tool holders, the wall hooks. It took a month before I was at the point that I'd
saved more than the purchase price. And since then it's been unbelievable savings. The reason I've included this is this is an essential final part of creating your smart home. It allows you to create all the custom boxes for your ESP chips, covers for your smart LEDs, bespoke solutions for your wall mounts. It is the final tool in your arsenal that you need to toss away all the high-cost, low-feature solutions from tech giants. So, I hope you enjoyed that quick trot through some of my favourite solutions. There are of course hundreds of other platforms and ecosystems But my goal with this was to share my view of the tools that I use to make a smart home. and give you a simple list rather than a dizzying
array of options. With these seven solutions you hopefully can see just how much you can automate
across your house with relative ease. Now please do let me know if there's something missing
or worthy of adding. There are a few things that get me as excited as discovering a new
open source ecosystem, so please do suggest in the comments. Oh! And please, please, please let
me know any cool ideas that you've got that could be built. It's so exciting to see them
and it gives me new ideas of crazy projects that I could build. I've already covered a lot
of examples of how I'm using these tools in my house but I've got even more coming up
so keep watching to see how they all come together.
