Flatness was the proof — two lines, two wrong suspects
Two radio links, two months of measurement. In Kapfenberg the culprit was my own automation, in Merano the measuring tool itself.
Series
Three places, one routine
Comparisons and ongoing projects across all three homes.
10 articles
For thirteen hours the shut-off hung on the cloud
A network outage, two new addresses — and the local path to both water valves was dead. Why fixed addresses matter most when you work locally.
What a radiator thermostat measures is not your room
Three homes, three ways to a radiator: tado over HomeKit, Shelly over Zigbee, and once no valve at all. What each gives you — and what none of them can do.
The stove obeys again — for 55 instead of 299 euros
The pellet stove accepts heat level and target temperature again. It took a 32-euro converter, the right baud rate, and one line of code in the right place.
Your remote access works — but you have not proved it
Three flats, three answers. Why a successful request from home proves nothing, why bans never expire — and why one location has nothing at all.
Three cities, three data sources, one question: when do I leave?
Departure boards in Merano, Kapfenberg and Vienna. The same idea built three times — and three times I got it wrong in a different place.
Kapfenberg was standing in one day
The third installation was the fastest — not because I had got better, but because the first two were written down. Plus one measurement with no occasion.
Vienna: three integrations in one day, and a dead file
The second installation was the first to profit from the first. And on the same morning it wrote a configuration that never had any effect.
Merano was the first — with nobody to look things up in
The first of the three installations. Two things came out of it that saved time later — one of them was a quotation mark.
The Raspberry Pi sat in a drawer for eleven months
Bought in September 2025, nothing achieved for a year. What changed after that was not the hardware — and the reorder date gives away the day.