My smart home will become dumb if I stop self-hosting these 5 services

Smart home gadgets have become a lot more affordable these days – to the point where you can nab dozens of cool gizmos and IoT products without spending more than $100. Heck, I often end up splurging on cheap smart devices to increase the comfort and convenience of my living space, though this setup introduces a couple of headaches. Since I tend to nab smart home products from different manufacturers, I’d have to use multiple applications to manage them all. Many of these first-party apps are rather restricted in their automation provisions.

Luckily, the self-hosted ecosystem includes plenty of neat apps that can help me manage smart home products and design IoT projects. Having tinkered with most of them, I consider these five tools the linchpins of my smart home management arsenal.

Frigate

A top-notch NVR utility

When you’ve got multiple surveillance cameras monitoring your living space, it’s a good idea to invest in a dedicated Network Video Recorder. That way, you’ll get motion detection, remote monitoring, automated alerts, and a handful of other advanced features to keep a weather eye on your smart home. Or, you could go down the self-hosted route like I did and deploy your own NVR server.

Although Blue Iris, ZoneMinder, and MotionEye have their own perks, I consider Frigate the best NVR solution for tinkerers. UI-wise, it has the most uncluttered and easy-to-use layout among its rivals. Thanks to its lightweight nature, it works well with Arm-based SBCs, even more so once you add accelerators to speed up machine-learning workloads. Speaking of, Frigate supports object detection, motion tracking, facial recognition, and other AI-powered facilities, and these work exceedingly well if you can connect an SFF GPU with the Frigate instance.

Mosquitto

For my MQTT devices

Capable of establishing communication between low-power IoT devices, the MQTT protocol is quite useful when you want to automate smart lights, sensors, and other inexpensive devices in your living space.

But aside from the smart devices, you’ll also need a broker that coordinates the messages, and I recommend self-hosting one to publish custom payloads to your paraphernalia. The Mosquitto broker is my favorite of the bunch, as it’s not only easy to set up, but also works well on most devices – including mere Raspberry Pi SBCs.

ESPHome

To build IoT projects with my ESP32

Microcontrollers are quite versatile for automation and circuitry projects, with ESP32 boards being the most popular MCUs in the smart home ecosystem. Between their faster processing speeds (compared to other MCU families) and support for Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connections, there are a plethora of IoT projects you can put together with these cheap devices.

ESPHome is one of the best tools for programming ESP32 boards to do your bidding. And I don’t mean complex code written in C/C++, either. ESPHome uses simple YAML configurations to program ESP32 boards, and you can create cool automation workflows with just a few lines of code. It also features an enormous amount of documentation for practically every sensor you can interface with an ESP32. The best part? It meshes exceedingly well with Home Assistant, allowing you to create ESP32 projects directly from the all-powerful smart home management platform. While we’re on the subject…

Home Assistant

The best smart home management platform

If you’re even remotely interested in the self-hosting ecosystem, you’ve definitely heard of Home Assistant. Since it’s compatible with most IoT devices, Home Assistant serves as a centralized platform for managing your smart home. Heck, HASS is the sole reason I don’t have to clutter my phone with apps from smart device manufacturers.

Besides letting you create different dashboards, Home Assistant also includes powerful automation provisions, including trigger-action scripts and community-created blueprints. Then there’s the sheer number of add-on services that you can run on a (non-containerized) Home Assistant server, including all the other apps I’ve mentioned on this list. Throw in the game-changing integrations you’ll find on Home Assistant Community Store, and it’s clear why the self-hosted community (including yours truly) loves HASS.

Node-RED

To create complex automation workflows

Although Home Assistant’s built-in automation provisions are perfect for most users, I rely on Node-RED to automate tasks in my smart home. On the surface, the workflows on Node-RED may seem rather complicated, but they’re surprisingly easy to use with a bit of practice. After all, creating long automation chains is easier when you can edit tiles and links instead of swapping between numerous menus on HASS.

Likewise, Node-RED’s visual-heavy interface makes troubleshooting a lot easier, since you don’t have to squint your eyes looking for a broken function inside a long YAML config. It also pairs well with Home Assistant as well as the other add-ons on the platform, so you can bring practically every device and service on HASS into your Node-RED flows.

Make your living space even smarter with cool self-hosted services

Besides the apps I’ve mentioned in the article, there are a couple of other handy tools that deserve a shout-out. Matterbridge is great for connecting Matter-based smart gadgets, while Zigbee2MQTT lets you combine Zigbee devices with their MQTT counterparts. For folks with a couple of UPS units in their arsenal, you can deploy a NUT server to keep an eye on their battery level, temps, and other metrics.