About yoyoKnows
Smart home advice from someone who has to support it on Monday
Most smart home content is written by people who unboxed a device, photographed it under a ring light, and moved on. This site is written by someone who installs this kind of technology, connects it to other technology, and then has to keep it running.
yoyoKnows covers smart home automation, smart gadgets, and security camera systems — with a heavy bias toward the parts that people get stuck on. Home Assistant configuration. Raspberry Pi projects that survive a reboot. Dashboards that a household will actually use instead of reaching for the light switch. Locking down the network the whole thing sits on.
The test for every article here is simple: would this have saved me time if I had read it before I started?
Who writes it
Bill Whyte. My day job is IT: managed services, Microsoft 365 administration, and fractional CIO work — the person clients call when something has broken, and also the person they call when they need to decide what to buy before it breaks.
Home Assistant is where the day job and the hobby meet. I build and maintain Home Assistant deployments, and a fair amount of what ends up on this site started as a problem I had to solve for real, on live kit, with someone waiting on the answer.
That background shapes the writing in a few concrete ways:
- I think about what happens in month six. A setup that works on a demo table and a setup that works after a firmware update, a power cut and a new router are different setups. The second one is the one worth writing about.
- I treat the network as part of the smart home. Cameras and hubs are computers on your LAN. A good chunk of what is published here is about SSH keys, segmentation, remote access and not exposing things to the internet by accident — because that is where the genuine risk lives.
- I assume you might be doing this yourself. Articles are written so a competent person can follow them without a support contract. If a step is genuinely hard, I say so rather than glossing over it.
How this site is written
A few commitments, stated so you can hold me to them:
Hands-on where it matters. Guides describing configuration, automation and setup come from things I have actually built and run. Where an article discusses hardware I have not personally deployed, it says so rather than implying otherwise.
No invented authority. You will not find claims here about testing labs, review panels, or a staff that does not exist. It is one person writing.
Problems get named. If a product or platform has an annoying limitation, that goes in the article. An article that makes everything sound easy is usually an article that has not been tried.
Corrections get made. Software moves. Home Assistant in particular moves quickly, and a guide that was right eighteen months ago may be wrong now. If you find something out of date or simply incorrect, tell me and I will fix it — this is the fastest way to improve the site and it is genuinely welcome.
Advertising does not buy coverage. The site carries Google ads, which is disclosed on the privacy policy. No advertiser has any say over what gets written or how a product is described, and we do not currently run affiliate links.
What you will find here
- Home Assistant — dashboards, automations, add-ons, and the configuration details that the official docs assume you already know
- Raspberry Pi and DIY automation — projects with a purpose, set up to be maintainable
- Smart home security — SSH hardening, key management, network setup, and thinking clearly about what you are actually exposing
- Smart gadgets and cameras — what a device does well, what it does badly, and what it needs from your network
Get in touch
Corrections, questions, a request for a guide on something you are stuck with — all welcome.