It’s almost the Christmas holidays! The best time of the year to get some new inspiration for making your home smart. Do you already have a smart home? Or looking for some inspiration to make it more convenient and smarter? Then make sure to check out the video.

At the beginning of December, the crew of Bright TV visited my home for an interview and tour of the smart home solutions I’ve implemented.

Creating a smart home already started 10 years ago with a starter kit from Philips Hue. Being able to remotely control your lights with an app and using a single physical switch to control the lights in multiple rooms was mindblowing for that time.

When is a home Smart?
It might be a good idea to describe what defines a “smart home” for me. A Smart home is centred around the home itself, being able to think and act on the sensor input it reads. For example, you are close to your home and the weather outside is 10 degrees, based on these inputs your home starts executing smart flows to turn on the lights, the vacuum robot goes back to its station, heat up the living room and starts playing your favourite music.

My Smart home Journey
I kicked off my smart home journey by using different home automation gateways like Domoticz, and Home Automation. Currently, I am using the Homey Pro gateway from Athom. I choose the Homey Pro gateway because it has stable software, supports many communication protocols (Z-Wave Plus, Zigbee, Bluetooth and infrared) and it has a lot of apps that create integration with other vendors.

Prevent vendor lock-in
I aim to create a smart home where I can combine the best available solution in the market that fit my use cases and prevent any vendor lock-in. I am a big fan of Apple hardware and love the Google Nest Hub for its great Voice Assistant, the Homey Pro gateway makes these and other vendors work together to create a smart home. For that reason, I am not using any Google Nest (Nest Protect, Nest Doorbell, Nest Camera) hardware besides the Google Nest Hub for the Google Voice Assistant. The options to integrate Nest hardware with smart home gateways like Homey Pro are limited.

In the future, I will post more about my smart home journey and setup.