Building My Ultimate Home IT Rack
Posted inGeneral

Building My Ultimate Home IT Rack

Introduction For years, my home network was housed in an IKEA Besta cabinet—a budget-friendly solution that worked but had its limitations. The components sat loosely inside, with cables running everywhere, and the network was managed by an unmanaged switch and a FritzBox modem/router. It was functional but far from optimal. You can read about the journey of creating the cabinet to upgrading it in the two linked blog articles I wrote here and here. This year, I finally took the leap and upgraded to a proper wall-mounted 19” 15U rack, fulfilling a long-time dream. This new setup improves manageability, reliability,…
Addicted to HomeAssistant
Posted inOnline & Digital Smart Home

Addicted to HomeAssistant

My Three-Year Journey with Home Assistant: The Brain of My Smart Home Three years ago, my journey into the world of smart home automation started with a simple problem: my wife and daughter sometimes forgot to turn off the hallway and bathroom lights. We use Philips Hue lights, and while they offer plenty of convenience and customization, they lacked a built-in timer function to turn off after a set period. In my quest to save energy and streamline my home’s operation, I started searching for a solution—and that’s when I stumbled upon Home Assistant. What started as a fix for…
DIY NETWORK CABINET House Upgrade
Posted inOnline & Digital

DIY NETWORK CABINET House Upgrade

Last year, I wrote an article about a DIY Network cabinet for my flat. This should be a central hub for all network connections and a nice clean space for all network devices such as routers, switches and NAS. This perfectly worked out while living in our flat but needed some adjustments when we moved into our house in late 2020. As you may remember, one central part of the cabinet was a 24-port gigabit switch. To get the cables to the switch I used a cable throughput and a switching board (which basically are double CAT5 connectors) on the…
Home Automation Part 2: HMIP Glass and Window Sensor
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Home Automation Part 2: HMIP Glass and Window Sensor

As mentioned in my previous post, I am working on home automation (mainly) with HomeMatic IP (HMIP). Well, and one gap I could find in their quite extensive range of different sensors was, that they did not have a glass breakage sensor - only window/door opening sensors. But because I wanted to secure all windows in our basement with both methods, I had to get creative. After a little research I ended up with these components: HomeMatic IP Kontakt-Schnittstelle 153149A0 HmIP-SCI (HMIM contact interface) costing about 30€ a piece.Abus Draht-NC-Öffnungsmelder FU7350W (Abus wire normally closed opening sensor) about 8€ a…