Smart Home Blog - News, Guides and Reviews
Discover the latest smart home news, in-depth guides, product reviews, and tutorials for building your automation setup.
Smart Home Guide is a hands-on resource for people who actually live with smart home gear, not just shop for it. Every guide on this blog starts with a real installation, a real protocol gotcha, or a real question we've fielded from readers running everything from a single Echo to a 60-device Home Assistant setup. We don't recycle press releases. When we write about a robot vacuum, we've had it on the floor for at least two weeks. When we cover a smart lock, we've installed it on a real door, paired it with at least two ecosystems, and pulled the battery to see what fails when. That's the bar for everything published here.
The blog is organized around the four areas where readers spend the most time: news on what's launching, deep dives into Home Assistant for people building serious automations, robot vacuum reviews and comparisons, and smart lighting guides covering everything from a single Hue bulb to whole-house Lutron Caseta. Below each section heading you'll find both fresh content and the evergreen guides that get updated as firmware, ecosystems, and standards shift. Matter, Thread, and the slow consolidation around Apple Home, Google Home, and SmartThings change which devices play nicely together every six months, so freshness matters more here than in most categories.
If you're new to smart home, start with the latest posts section, it surfaces the introductory guides we keep up to date as platforms evolve. If you're already deep into Home Assistant or running Zigbee2MQTT, jump straight to the Home Assistant section for setup walkthroughs, integration troubleshooting, and automation recipes that go beyond the official docs. The robot vacuum reviews focus on real cleaning performance across rugs, pet hair, and mixed flooring, not just the spec sheet. Smart lighting coverage goes beyond Philips Hue into Aqara T1, Sengled, and the Matter-over-Thread bulbs that are quietly displacing Zigbee in new builds. Browse by topic at the bottom to find articles tagged by every brand, protocol, and category we've covered.
Latest Posts
Fresh guides, reviews, and news — published this week.
I killed a lot of plants before I let the smart home...
The cheapest time to wire a smart home is when the walls...
A home studio lives or dies on two things the microphone hears...
MOVA's Mobius 60 packs swappable mop pads, 8cm step-climbing, and 30,000 Pa...
FriendlyElec's NanoPi NEO3 Plus is a tiny $24 board with LPDDR4 RAM,...
Roborock's Qrevo Curv 2 Flow ditches spinning mop pads for a self-washing...
News
Firmware releases, launches, and platform updates, with our take on what matters. See all news →
Yale is connecting its European Linus smart locks to Alarm.com, so your...
IKEA's TOFSMYGGA is a weatherproof outdoor smart plug for around 149 SEK...
Shelly's compact Flood S Gen4 puts Matter and Zigbee 3.0 in an...
Matter 1.6 shipped on June 17, 2026, and the headline isn't a...
SONOFF keeps shipping cheap Zigbee gear, but only some of it earns...
Home Assistant OS 18 shipped in June, got pulled, then 18.1 cleaned...
Home Assistant
Open-source automation platform that puts you in control.
Philips Hue set the smart-lighting standard and the smart-lighting price. In 2026...
Everyone in the smart home forums swears by Home Assistant, but is...
Yeelight bulbs are cheap, bright, and surprisingly capable, but the cloud app...
I've tested roughly 60 smart home devices across two homes over three...
I built my first smart home backwards, 14 Wi-Fi bulbs and three...
Smart home automation is just a trigger paired with an action: motion...
Across my own four-camera setup, the hardware cost $412 once; the cloud...
HACS, ESPHome, Zigbee2MQTT, Frigate, Node-RED, Mushroom, Adaptive Lighting, Browser Mod, Spotify, Mobile...
Run the official ghcr.io/home-assistant/home-assistant:stable container, bind a config volume, set network_mode: host,...
Zigbee2MQTT bridges your Zigbee radio to Home Assistant through an MQTT broker...
Nine times out of ten, a device Home Assistant won't discover is...
Securing Home Assistant comes down to one rule above the rest: never...
Home Cleaning
Robot vacuums, mops, and smart cleaning devices for effortless home maintenance.
I've run three robot vacuums through Home Assistant and rooted one myself....
A good robot vacuum doesn't just clean the floor. Paired with a...
Complete comparison of iRobot Roomba models in 2026 - learn the differences...
Find out if iRobot is a good investment in 2026. Discover the...
iRobot, Roborock, and Ecovacs all claim the top spot, but their performance...
Confused between the Ecovacs Deebot X2 Omni, T20 Omni, and N10 Plus?...
MWC is not just smartphones. This year, eufy rolled in with new...
Robot vacuums range from $100 basic models to $1,400 self-emptying mop combos....
Dreame transitions from a specialist in robot vacuums to a full smart...
Ecovacs entered the Polish market with robotic lawn mowers priced lower than...
Eufy is running significant discounts on its robot vacuum and mop combo...
Roborock's newest vacuum is the first from the brand to use a...
Smart Lighting
Bulbs, strips, and switches to set the perfect ambiance.
New to the whole smart home idea and drowning in jargon? This...
Whether you collect vinyl, wine, sneakers, or vintage cameras, the display is...
I've wired up three homes, and my first working setup ran under...
IKEA TRADFRI is one of the cheapest ways to build a Zigbee...
Your yoga mat is already there. The missing piece is the environment...
Smart switches replace ordinary wall switches to give you app control, voice...
You don't own the walls, so you can't touch the wiring. That...
A home library lives or dies on two things most people ignore:...
The difference between a bathroom and a spa is mostly atmosphere, and...
Gallery-quality art lighting at home used to mean hiring an electrician and...
A smart home gym does more than play music. It adjusts ventilation...
A smart home relaxation setup fails or succeeds on three variables: lighting...
Browse by Topic
Explore all smart home topics covered on this blog.