Sensors, switches and the brain

Sensing

• Presence, not just motion. Millimetre-wave presence sensors in the bathrooms know someone is there even when they are perfectly still — so the lights stay on in the shower and switch off only when the room is truly empty, with a stale-state watchdog as the safety net.
• Climate. Every air conditioner is controllable (Sensibo controllers, with local HomeKit twins under evaluation), and room temperatures are answerable by voice in any of three languages.
• Energy. Zigbee smart plugs with power metering on the office, the bedroom charger and the kitchen — measurement first, automation second.
• Two radios, two jobs. Zigbee and Thread each get their own Home Assistant Connect ZBT-2 stick: Zigbee for the plugs and the motion sensors, Thread for the Matter presence sensors. A Matter bridge add-on can also publish the house into Apple Home, Google Home or Alexa as ordinary Matter devices for anyone who prefers a familiar app — set up on request.
• Cameras with names. Frigate watches the important rooms with on-device AI: person detection, and face recognition that announces family members by name through the living-room speaker. Four years of photos trained it; nothing leaves the house. (Frigate is our lab’s own experiment — for customers we recommend and install Ubiquiti’s UniFi Protect, which recognises faces on its own cameras and feeds the same announcements.)
• Motorised curtains. SwitchBot units ride the living-room curtain rod, solar-topped, talking Bluetooth to the house through a repurposed smart speaker acting as a radio bridge — no vendor hub, no cloud account. They open on a morning schedule, close for movie night, and always yield to a human hand.
• Environment. Air quality from a neighbourhood monitoring station feeds the dashboards with a staleness guard, and per-drive temperature sensors make the NAS a first-class citizen of the smart home.
• The desktop gaming PC, telemetry included. CPU and GPU load, temperatures and power draw stream into a dedicated dashboard page whenever the machine is up — and the page tidies itself away when it is not.

Acting