My History with Smart Home

My history with smart home started with "I really wish I could turn off the lights from bed." About ten years ago, when I was still living in Germany, IKEA launched the Trådfri line, which let me, someone who couldn't yet afford Philips Hue, reach that goal easily. Back then I treated these products as "lights with a remote," and connecting them to the internet hadn't crossed my mind. I suppose that still was my first step into the world of smart homes.

After I moved to NL, my living condition changed; there were simply more lights to turn off before bed, and I sometimes needed to keep an eye on the house when I am away. So I started buying more devices: a Logitech Circle 2, two Philips Hue lights... and I even ended up with a Zigbee hub for every brand: the Trådfri Gateway (now discontinued) and the Philips Hue Bridge. To keep delivering on "turn off every light in the house from bed," everything had to connect to Apple Home and also be automated (lights in a room turn on when motion is detected, turn off when I leave, partly turn on when I get home... etc.). The system grew more and more complicated, flaky, and harder to maintain.

The Biggest Problems

Unreliable integrations

The network topology at the time was a mess. To start with, my Zigbee network was split into two separate networks because of UX and OTA updates: the Philips Hue ecosystem is very stable and has great UX, but naturally it won't update bulbs from other brands on its network. The Trådfri Gateway needed a reboot about once a week, which made the bulbs seem to want a reboot every week too. Remotes paired directly to the bulbs could just about control the lights, but controlling them from my phone often came down to luck. This instability alone completely blocked the wish of "turn off the lights from bed."

A maintenance headache

To make it all work together, I also bought a Raspberry Pi to run Homebridge. The result: near the router there were several plastic-ky devices, each with its own network cable and its own power adapter. That cluttered feeling was really annoying.

Automation: complicated and flaky

I'd hoped Apple Home, with a home hub, could become the control center, so I bought a HomePod mini for it (in hindsight I should have gone straight for an Apple TV). But since the HomePod mini connects wirelessly, and Apple Home itself isn't very quick, with data bouncing between all kinds of odd integrations, a button press often turned the light on two seconds later.

Apple Home also isn't really a good place to configure remote buttons. Its UI hasn't noticeably improved in the five or six years since launch (not a thing to blame Apple, it's just not the focus of their product). In short, once your needs get a bit specialized, Apple Home isn't suited to be your automation hub.

The New Design

Repurposing a retired MacBook Pro as the new hub

After leaving Tinka, I bought my work laptop from the company. When it was replaced by another machine in 2026, I set it up as my home server, like this:

1. I first tried some apps (e.g. Caffeine), then decided that setting pmset directly was the safest:

   sudo pmset -a disablesleep 1   # don't sleep even when the lid is closed
   sudo pmset -a sleep 0          # don't sleep when the system is idle
   sudo pmset -a displaysleep 1   # turn the display off after 1 minute (default is 10)

2. Turn on File Sharing, Media Sharing, Content Caching, Remote Login (SSH)

Installing Home Assistant (HA) in a VM

I followed the tutorial at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MChIobtzmY. In short:

1. Use UTM to install the official disk image
2. Give it 2 GB of RAM and 40 GB of disk. I only plan to run HA in this VM and nothing else, so 2 GB is plenty; peak usage so far has been around 75%.

Home Assistant in 2026 is surprisingly easy to set up. The complexity is mostly elsewhere.

Setting up Zigbee2MQTT (Z2M) again on this home server

As mentioned above, I have a Raspberry Pi running Homebridge, and it even had an old Zigbee adapter attached, which I used to add some devices the Hue Bridge refuses to take.

Reinstalling Mosquitto and Z2M on this Mac and setting them up as LaunchDaemons took a bit longer than I expected. Unsurprisingly, it was permissions again. If you don't deal with Unix permissions regularly, you always forget. Fortunately, in 2026 there's AI to chat with, so none of these settings is hard to adjust. In short: remember to set chown and chmod, and tell Mosquitto which user to run as.

A New Adapter for Weird Wireless Protocols

The old Zigbee adapter was built on the experimental ZiGate architecture, which meant none of my IKEA bulbs could get OTA updates. So this time I went straight for the SMLIGHT SLZB-MR4U. What sold me was that it's multi-protocol: not only can it take over my Zigbee network, it can also act as an additional Thread router, so I no longer have to worry about the HomePod mini's flaky connection.

Migrating devices from the old adapter

The Z2M website says that moving from ZiGate to Ember means re-pairing every device. That sounds painful, but it wasn't too bad. The trick is to copy the devices list from the old configuration.yaml into the new configuration.yaml. That way, after re-pairing, you don't have to set friendly names by hand, and since HA identifies devices by their IEEE address (0x12345...), you don't have to redo areas or names either.

I shut down the old Z2M, started the new one, pressed Allow Join, and went around the house visiting every device waiting to be paired: bulbs first (IKEA's reset procedure is switching the light on and off six times in a row), then remotes, then the IR motion sensors. It all took about an hour.

Setting up automations in HA

The best thing about setting up a smart home in 2026 is that you can talk to Claude or another LLM and work out automation YAML that's usable almost immediately, instead of piecing together a working configuration while reading the documentation.

My most complicated setup is, once again, in the bedroom:

1. Each bedside table has an IKEA RODRET remote. It switches that side's bedside lamp on and off, a long press of the off button turns off every light in the house, and a long press of the on button turns on a scene suited to waking up (fairly bright but not too bright, an energetic mix of lights).
2. The vanity mirror light is controlled by a first-generation IKEA Trådfri five-button remote, which adjusts brightness and warm/cool color temperature. A long press of the up button turns every light in the bedroom to maximum brightness.

Backing up Home Assistant

I'd considered buying a new drive to back up the devices in the house with Time Machine, but thanks to the 2026 chip shortage, drive prices have basically doubled. So I chose to back up Home Assistant to Backblaze B2 instead, which is free under 10 GB. The plan is a daily backup, keeping only the last 30 days. That way, even if each backup eventually grows to 250 MB, I'd still stay within the free tier.

Systemic improvements

Buttons and lights respond faster

The hub is now several times more powerful than before and the connection is much more stable (even though the MacBook is on Wi-Fi), so button presses now feel almost instant.

Less unnecessary network complexity, fewer boxes

The new adapter is connected via Ethernet and tucked away in the TV cabinet. The old Raspberry Pi is retired for now, but it could hide in the router cabinet and become a dedicated Pi-hole machine someday.

A month from now, I'm even considering replacing the Hue Bridge, so the house has just one Zigbee network.

Simpler configuration

In HA I just group the lights and share them to Apple Home through the HomeKit Bridge, and Apple Home ends up tidy and pleasant to use. Renaming can also be done in HA and synced over, so I no longer have to put up with its janky Catalyst UI.

Apple Home now only handles phone use and remote access. For automation, I only set up leaving-home and arriving-home automations (using iOS's built-in location features), and even the arriving-home one is set up in HA with an input_button helper, so all the automation details live in HA. If I have more complex needs, I can copy out the YAML and ask an AI for feedback or help editing it.

Closing Thoughts

Setting all this up, I couldn't help feeling that Home Assistant really is a technology that keeps getting better. I briefly tried it in 2023 and found it a hassle to set up (it was on a Raspberry Pi back then, and dealing with venv and the like wasn't easy), with a bare-bones interface, so I didn't stick with it. This time around, besides the project itself having improved, it may also be because of the two years I spent working with Python at CodeGrade: looking at Home Assistant's code now feels very familiar. Its interface design for organizing huge numbers of settings also has a lot worth learning from. I'm glad I didn't buy a Homey Pro for convenience and end up in another closed system.

This month, while scrolling YouTube Shorts, I came across an interior designer influencer recommending Philips Hue, and the reason was still "so you can turn off all the lights from bed." It seems that in ten years, the evolution of smart homes has never strayed from that original goal.