Richard Lee

I have been running presence sensors in my own home for the last 18 months, and the difference they make is dramatic. Lights stay on when my partner reads on the couch, HVAC shuts off when the office is empty, and my bathroom fan no longer runs for an hour after I leave. If you […]

I’ve been running Home Assistant for years, and the single biggest upgrade to my lighting and climate automations came not from a new hub, but from ditching PIR motion sensors for mmWave presence sensors. The difference is night and day: lights that used to switch off while I sat reading, fans that kicked off mid-workout,

After spending 60-plus hours swapping eight Zigbee coordinators across a 2,400-square-foot home with 73 paired devices, I can tell you the difference between a flaky mesh and a rock-solid one almost always comes down to the coordinator. The best Zigbee coordinators for Home Assistant in are no longer a single pick – they split cleanly

After six weeks of sleeping next to ten different smart displays, swapping one out every few nights, I have a strong opinion about which ones actually belong on a nightstand. The best smart displays for bedrooms in are not just smaller versions of kitchen hubs. A good bedroom smart display has to handle a sunrise

I have been testing smart buttons in my own home for over three years now, and the category has changed more since last year than in the previous five combined. Smart buttons used to mean a single coin-cell puck that toggled a light. In , the best smart buttons for home automation trigger entire routines,

I spent three months living with ten different smart curtain motors across two homes, three smart-home hubs, and roughly 23 windows of every size and shape. After running daily routines, Matter pairings, blackout tests with 12-pound velvet panels, and a few 6 a.m. wake-ups from a “silent” motor that turned out to be anything but,

I spent the last 60 days installing, calibrating, and living with eight of the most popular smart blind motors on the market to figure out which ones actually deserve a spot in your home. My team and I ran each motor through 200+ open/close cycles, paired them with Apple Home, Alexa, Google Home, and Home

When I installed my first NVMe SSD inside a PlayStation 5, I hit a wall almost immediately: Sony’s system refused to format the drive until a heatsink was attached. After 30 days of testing 8 different PS5 SSD heatsinks across a standard PS5, a PS5 Slim, and several Gen4 NVMe drives, I learned that not

I still remember the first time I plugged a flight stick into my Xbox Series X. I had spent two years using the standard gamepad for Microsoft Flight Simulator, fighting with the right trigger for throttle and the left stick for yaw, and I assumed any joystick would be a step up. After 30 days

I spent the last two months switching between ten different Switch 2 grips across daily handheld sessions of Mario Kart World, long Zelda runs, and competitive Split Fiction weekends. My hands are large, my commute is brutal, and the Switch 2’s flat Joy-Con 2 design genuinely hurt after thirty minutes of play. That pain is