Kenny Nyhus Fadil – Smart Home & Tech Publisher

I run a local-first Home Assistant setup at home in Sweden — a self-hosted hub with dedicated Zigbee and Z-Wave coordinators and Matter-over-Thread for the newer gear. The house leans on motion and presence sensors, in-wall relays behind the existing switches, energy-reporting smart plugs, and local-recording cameras, rather than a drawer full of single-purpose apps. Voice assistants are wired in as one more input, never as the thing the automations depend on.

Smart home is the meta-hobby that ties the rest of my workshop together: the same rule engine that runs the lights also handles the grow-light schedules, the sauna pre-heat, and the curing-chamber compressor. That crossover is the lens I bring to HomeAutoCentral — a smart home is presence, state, and automations that survive an outage, not a pile of gadgets that only look good in a product video.

I’ve made most of the mistakes already — flashed the wrong firmware, trusted a cloud-only device in a core routine, let entity names sprawl until they tamed me — and I write about what actually held up. Everything here is judged by one question: does it still work when the internet is down?