Maker Monday - Making the Home Smart, One Episode at a Time

Hopefully you enjoyed the YouTube series we announced last week, Betty's IT Bits. This week we have another new series to introduce: it's Maker Monday, and the first episode is available as I type these very words!

If you're interested in DIY home automation and enjoy watching tech-savvy people tinkering with technology and building some cool things, then this series is for you!

The First Two Episodes

The first two episodes of Maker Monday are hosted by Bernd, an IT admin at Paessler. In later episodes you'll also see his colleague, Björn. They will be putting the "smart" into "Smart Home", as they take you through steps for creating a home automation system using only tree branches and some duct tape.

Just kidding, they'll be using some cheap and readily-accessible hardware and programs.

They'll start off simply enough, but the complexity will grow over time.

In the first episode, Bernd installs Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi and sets up an MQTT broker. In the next episode, he'll set up some wireless power sockets for controlling devices over the network.

We'll release a new Maker Monday episode every second week (alternating each Monday with Betty's IT Bits). Go take a look at the first episode, and let us know in the comments (either here or on YouTube) what you think.

And if you have any ideas of what you'd like to see built in future episodes, let us know!