Smart Home Newsletter

Jargon Buster

Your guide to smart home terminology. From protocols to platforms, understand the tech that powers home automation.

19 terms across 4 categories

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Platforms

Amazon Alexa

Amazon Alexa is Amazon's voice assistant and smart home platform with the largest device ecosystem and market share. Compatible with practically everything, it's the path of least resistance - affordable Echo hardware, thousands of skills, and the voice assistant your less-techy relatives probably already have.

Apple HomeKit

Apple HomeKit is Apple's smart home platform with end-to-end encryption and privacy-first design. It integrates with iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch, using Siri for voice control. You'll need Apple hardware (HomePod or Apple TV as hub), but everything "just works" with that signature Apple polish.

Google Home

Google Home is Google's smart home platform built around the Google Assistant, offering deep integration with Google services like Calendar, Gmail, and YouTube. The voice assistant is genuinely the smartest of the big three - it understands context and handles follow-ups. The trade-off? Your data fuels the machine.

Home Assistant

Home Assistant is an open-source home automation platform that runs locally on your own hardware, giving you complete control over your smart home without relying on cloud services. With 2 million active installations and 21,000+ contributors, it's become the de facto standard for local-first automation.

Homey

Homey is an all-in-one smart home hub with built-in radios for Zigbee, Z-Wave, Thread, Matter, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, infrared, and 433 MHz RF. It offers Home Assistant-level power without the learning curve - the "no dongles required" approach to home automation with a polished, user-friendly interface.

Protocols & Standards

Matter

Matter is an open, royalty-free smart home connectivity standard that enables interoperability between devices from different manufacturers. It lets products from Apple, Google, Amazon, and Samsung work together without compatibility headaches - no proprietary hub required.

MQTT

MQTT is a lightweight publish/subscribe messaging protocol designed for low-bandwidth, high-latency networks. In smart homes, it's the messaging backbone that lets devices talk to each other by publishing and subscribing to topics - a super-efficient postal system where devices broadcast messages and others choose to listen in.

Thread

Thread is a low-power, IPv6-based mesh networking protocol designed specifically for smart home devices. It creates a self-healing network where each device strengthens the mesh - if one goes down, the others pick up the slack. It's the primary transport layer for Matter wireless devices.

Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi is a wireless networking protocol that most smart home devices use because it requires no additional hub - just your existing router. The catch? It drains batteries quickly, congests your network with dozens of devices, and isn't designed for the low-power world of IoT sensors.

Z-Wave

Z-Wave is a wireless mesh networking protocol that operates on sub-GHz frequencies, offering superior wall penetration and mandatory device certification for guaranteed interoperability. Every device is certified before it hits the market - you'll pay more, but you'll troubleshoot less.

Integration & Infrastructure

ESPHome

ESPHome is an open-source firmware framework that turns ESP32 and ESP8266 microcontrollers into custom smart home devices using simple YAML configuration files. It's the gateway drug to DIY home automation - once you realize you can build a $5 temperature sensor that does exactly what you want, there's no going back.

Zigbee2MQTT

Zigbee2MQTT is open-source software that connects Zigbee devices to your smart home via MQTT, eliminating the need for vendor-specific hubs. One USB coordinator, 3,000+ supported devices, zero proprietary apps - your Aqara sensors and Philips bulbs finally live in the same network, controlled locally.

General & Concepts

Home Automation

Home automation is the technology that allows smart home devices to operate automatically based on triggers, schedules, or conditions. It's the difference between controlling your lights from an app (convenient) and having them turn on automatically when you walk in the door at sunset (magical). The devices are hardware - automation gives them a brain.

Local Control

Local control is when your smart home devices operate entirely on your local network without requiring cloud servers or internet connectivity. Your commands stay on your network, devices respond instantly, and when Amazon's servers go down or a company kills their cloud service, your lights still turn on. Ownership vs renting.

Smart Home

A smart home is a residence equipped with internet-connected devices that can be monitored and controlled remotely via smartphone, voice, or automation. It's less about having fancy gadgets and more about making your home respond to how you actually live - lights, thermostats, locks, and more working together.

Smart Home Hub

A smart home hub is a central device that connects and coordinates smart home devices across different protocols like Zigbee, Z-Wave, and Thread. It translates between protocols, runs automations locally, and gives you a single app to control everything - instead of twelve apps from twelve manufacturers.

Voice Assistant

A voice assistant is software that uses speech recognition and natural language processing to control smart home devices and answer questions. Whether it's Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri, or an open-source alternative, it translates spoken commands into device actions - and with AI/LLM integration, they now understand what you mean, not just keywords.

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