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 the smart home platform that won by showing up everywhere first. With over half the smart speaker market and compatibility with practically everything, it's the path of least resistance - affordable hardware, thousands of skills, and the voice assistant your less-techy relatives probably already have.

Apple HomeKit

Apple HomeKit is the smart home platform for people who chose the Apple ecosystem and want that same "it just works" philosophy applied to their home. Privacy-first by design, everything encrypted end-to-end, and Siri ties it all together - but you'll need Apple hardware and accept a smaller device selection.

Google Home

Google Home is the smart home platform for people who live in Google's world. The voice assistant is genuinely the smartest of the big three - it understands context, handles follow-up questions, and knows your calendar. The trade-off? Google's business model means your data fuels the machine.

Home Assistant

Home Assistant is the fast-moving heart of the open-source smart home movement. With 2 million active installations and 21,000+ contributors, it's become the de facto standard for local-first home automation - the platform that made "your data stays home" a mainstream expectation.

Homey

Homey is the smart home hub for people who want Home Assistant's power without the learning curve. With built-in radios for Zigbee, Z-Wave, Thread, Matter, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, infrared, and 433 MHz RF - all in one box - it's the "no dongles required" approach to home automation.

Protocols & Standards

Matter

Matter is the smart home industry's attempt to finally get everyone to play nice together. It's an open connectivity standard that lets devices from different brands (Apple, Google, Amazon, Samsung, you name it) actually work with each other without the usual compatibility headaches.

MQTT

MQTT is the messaging backbone of DIY smart homes. It's a lightweight protocol that lets your devices talk to each other by publishing and subscribing to topics - think of it as a super-efficient postal system where devices can broadcast messages and others can choose to listen in.

Thread

Thread is a low-power mesh networking protocol that lets smart home devices talk to each other without a central hub. Think of it as the invisible web that Matter devices use to communicate - each device strengthens the network, and if one goes down, the others pick up the slack.

Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi is the default choice for smart home devices because it's already everywhere - no hub required, instant setup, and your router handles it all. The catch? It'll drain batteries in days, congest your network with dozens of devices, and isn't designed for the "always listening" low-power world of IoT.

Z-Wave

Z-Wave is the "it just works" mesh protocol for smart homes. Every device is certified for compatibility before it hits the market, and the sub-GHz radio cuts through walls that would stop Zigbee dead. You'll pay more, but you'll troubleshoot less.

Integration & Infrastructure

ESPHome

ESPHome turns cheap microcontrollers into custom smart home devices using simple configuration files instead of code. 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 the open-source bridge that frees your Zigbee devices from vendor 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 through any system that speaks MQTT.

General & Concepts

Home Automation

Home automation is the "if this, then that" logic that makes a smart home actually smart. 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 just hardware - automation is what gives them a brain.

Local Control

Local control means your smart home works without the internet. Your commands stay on your network, your devices respond instantly, and when Amazon's servers go down or a company shuts off their cloud, your lights still turn on. It's the difference between owning your smart home and renting it.

Smart Home

A smart home is a residence equipped with connected devices that automate everyday tasks - lights, thermostats, locks, and more - all controllable from your phone or voice. It's less about having fancy gadgets and more about making your home respond to how you actually live.

Smart Home Hub

A smart home hub is the central brain that connects your devices and makes them work together. It translates between protocols (Zigbee, Z-Wave, Thread), runs your automations locally, and gives you a single app to control everything - instead of twelve apps from twelve manufacturers.

Voice Assistant

A voice assistant is the "hey, turn off the lights" interface to your smart home. Whether it's Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri, or an open-source alternative, it translates your spoken commands into device actions. And with AI/LLM integration, they're getting genuinely smarter - not just matching keywords, but understanding what you actually mean.

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