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…
Yet another Home Office Setup
Posted inOnline & Digital

Yet another Home Office Setup

In the recent weeks and months during the pandemic, I have seen many people sharing pictures of their home office setup to give others ideas about what works in certain scenarios and benefit from the experiences of others. I would like to tune into this and share my current home office setup - everything from the desk to the computer and camera. My Usecase The ideal setup does not exist. But if it does, it strongly depends on what you do at your desk. In my case, I am in online meetings most of the day - presenting our software…
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…
Home Automation Part 1: HomeMatic IP
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Home Automation Part 1: HomeMatic IP

Last year, we bought our own house. It is 15 years old and had a, for that time, quite modern equipment (electric window blinds, underfloor heating, electrical garage door etc.). But, of course, non of it was really 'smart'. A fact that needed to be changed. Three major areas I wanted to tackle are: Window blinds, heating, fire alarm and burglar alarm. People into the topic might ask why "Light" is not in the list? Well, I cover that topic entirely with Philips Hue lighting wherever the lighting needs to be smart. In other cases I have installed motion sensors.…