Smart Home Tech
Network upgrades • Home Servers • Smart Homes Next-generation technology for your home or office.
Home Assistant allows for all sorts of cool stuff for your home.
- Update your network with the latest new tech
- Speed up your network
- Install a home server
- Turn things on & off using sensors and smart logic
Make a booking
Ready to sort out your Smart Home Tech needs?
Commercial-Grade Networking (Ubiquiti UniFi)
Next-Gen Networking Setups
Mac Zen uses and recommends Ubiquiti UniFi for networking hardware—the market leader in this segment.
With a bewildering array of products and stunning administration capabilities:
- Effortlessly scale your network
- Add WiFi access points to eliminate bandwidth issues
- Monitor via iOS or browser
- Intrusion detection
- Latest WiFi standards
- Fast processing
- Remote monitoring for admins (opt-in feature)
Saturating challenging environments with a solid wireless signal is what Ubiquiti does best.
NAS & Server Monitoring
Synology NAS Hardware • Remote Monitoring
The sky’s the limit here:
- More drives for redundancy and cheap space
- SSD for speedy cache
- Small, medium, or large capacity
- 2.5 or 10 Gigabit Ethernet
- Backups to the cloud
Mac Zen can configure (and monitor, if desired) hardware uptime and notifications for your most important gear. If something starts to go awry, you (or we) are notified and able to act before something goes offline or data is lost.
This is the best way to avoid problems becoming disasters. If this gets you excited, drop us a line.
Smart Home Setups using Home Assistant
Make Your Home Come Alive
Over the last 10 years, smart home technology has evolved and matured into something genuinely exciting, allowing your home (or office) to take on a personality of its own.
This is a hobby turned side-project for Mac Zen’s founder, Duncan, who’s thoroughly consumed by smart home tech, particularly Home Assistant.
What is Home Assistant?
Home Assistant is an open-source “homeOS” or “home hub” aimed at creating a local-only (no cloud server requirement), brand-agnostic central platform for virtually any smart home device to connect to and be controlled by.
Home Assistant is an almost infinitely configurable platform that can do amazing things, integrating most brands and all categories of smart devices:
- Smart video doorbells & door locks
- Camera streaming to TV and stereo when person detected
- Door, window, vibration, and movement sensors
- Power monitoring; solar generation, whole-house or per-device
- Garage door openers
- Infrared remote control for old devices
- Weather data from the Bureau – forecast, observation & radar
- AI: ChatGPT or Claude integration for voice interaction, device control or for use building automations
…and this is just the tip of the iceberg!
Home Assistant needs to run – on a dedicated device, like a RaspberryPi or MiniPC, or by sharing the resources of a computer – on your network. That way it can communicate with and connect to other devices in your setup. By using Home Assistant’s extensive automation and monitoring capabilities, along with custom dashboards, your house or office will seem to act by itself. It’s really cool – and very useful.
Smart Home Tech Examples
- Push doorbell camera feed to your TV and/or phone when a person is detected at the front door and/or doorbell is pressed
- Send alerts to your phone when movement is detected or a door/window opens when nobody’s home
- Leak, vibration, or unusual activity detection
- Turn AC on when solar generation exceeds a certain threshold
- Turn front light on ten minutes after sunset, off again at 11:30, (and at different times on other days if desired)
- Turn all devices in house off when phones start charging after 10:30 (ie going to bed – no turning off lights manually ever again!)
- Turn fan on based on humidity differential inside vs outside – for laundry room where clothes dry
- Host your own LLM for local-only voice recognition for interacting with your house – or integrate your favourite cloud AI
With a wide variety of sensors and powerful logic, complex automations can be created quickly and easily with no code – all menu-driven and drag-and-drop ease of use. This means you can take control easily once it’s up & running – or MZ can continue to monitor, manage and maintain your Smart Home into the future.
Home Assistant is THE smart home platform. Jump on-board now.
Intrigued? Send a message requesting additional info.
