My Tech Home
Tinkering. Experimenting. Documenting. Repeat.
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Real Tinkering
Not a polished tech blog — just an honest record of what worked, what didn’t, and the dead ends along the way.
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Home Automation
Home Assistant, Raspberry Pi, smart devices — and whatever rabbit hole happened to emerge next.
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Inspiration, Not Instruction
Take what’s useful for your own home. Every setup is different — and that’s exactly the point.
The Beginning
(or rather — what prompted all of this)
Back in the day, when there was a virus running rampant around the world, I had other things going on within family life. An elderly relative was already on their way down the slippery road of mental health as dementia and age started to take a hold. As dementia does, it changed their personality and periods of both being welcomed and being hated did not mix well with the lockdowns and restrictions that COVID brought the UK.
One of the things they used to enjoy doing was watching the TV. Typically having a core interest in sport, it meant that Sky TV was the way to go all those years ago. The sheltered accommodation that they live in changed the Sky HD dishes to ones that needed Sky Q — and as age took hold, the complexity of Sky Q has become too much in recent years.
Guess what though: it does not matter that a completely tech-illiterate person did not even know how to use a mobile phone, nor had any Internet installed at all — they had to migrate to Sky Q regardless.
The Slow Down
Over the last two years, my relative has slowed down both because of mental health and age. The buttons on the Sky Q remote can no longer be pressed fast enough to change the channel, the menus and options too complicated to navigate. Even turning on the Sky box and immediately being prompted by something other than just the last channel watched has become a chore.
You cannot simply have a setting to turn on and go to the last channel watched. You have to see a menu that is mostly useless without Internet.
So I had to find a simple, one-touch solution. This is my journey to do that.
Reference Pages
These pages don’t follow a posting schedule — they grow alongside the projects. Bookmark them and check back.
🛠️ Home Assistant: Equipment & Software
A living document covering all the hardware, integrations, add-ons, and software that power my Home Assistant setup. Updated as the project evolves.
📄 More Coming Soon
As new projects develop and documentation grows, new reference pages will appear here. Duplicate the left-hand card to add them.