About Home Automation Weekly
We've been automating homes for more than two decades. Long enough to remember when "smart home" meant a lamp that turned on, most of the time, if nobody nearby was running a vacuum.
That was X10. It sent commands over your home's electrical wiring, and it was cheap, clever and unreliable in about equal measure. Then came the early hubs, which promised to tie everything together and usually tied together about half of it.
A couple of names from that era are still around. HomeSeer and Insteon both go back to the X10 days, and both are still relevant today. Insteon even came back after a shutdown scare, when a group of its own customers bought the company and switched the servers back on.
Zigbee and Z-Wave were the first real step up. Dedicated wireless meshes. Devices that answered when you called them. Still fussy to pair, still split into camps that didn't talk to each other, but you could build something you trusted.
Then the cloud voice assistants arrived and put a smart speaker in millions of kitchens. Adoption jumped. So did a new problem: when the company's servers went down, or the company changed its mind, your lights stopped listening.
Home Assistant changed the conversation for a lot of people. Local control, open integrations, and a community that refuses to accept "not supported" as a final answer. It also takes real time to learn. We'll tell you that up front.
Now we're watching Matter, Thread and local AI try to fix what came before: devices that work across brands, networks that don't depend on one company's hub, and voice control that doesn't have to leave your house. Some of it is genuinely better. Some of it isn't ready. We cover both.
What this site is for
Home Automation Weekly is a resource for three things: what's new, what's possible, and how it all fits together.
That last part matters most. Any single device is easy to review. The hard question is what happens when it has to share a network, an app and a routine with fifteen other things from six other companies.
What you get
- A weekly newsletter. The week's news that actually affects your setup, minus the press-release noise.
- Practical guides. How to plan, choose, connect and fix things, written so you can follow along with the gear in front of you.
- Plain-English coverage. If a term needs explaining, we explain it. Our glossary covers the alphabet soup, from Zigbee to Thread border routers.
- Honesty about what breaks and what it costs. Subscriptions, cloud dependencies, abandoned products, the hub you'll need that nobody mentioned. You'll hear about it here.
We don't think every home needs to be automated. We do think the people who want it deserve straight answers.
Get it every week
One email a week. What changed, what's worth your attention, and what to skip.