Smart Home Setups
Home networks & servers. Smart home stuff.
Local, secure smart home setups, fast networking gear, home servers.
Monitoring, streaming, hifi, lights, sensors, security – the limit is your imagination.
- Home Assistant — one hub for every brand
- Sensors and logic that make the smart house act by itself – like magic
- Faster, more reliable wired and wireless networking
- A home server that looks after itself to store all your precious data, securely
Home Assistant
Make your home come alive.
Home Assistant is an open-source home hub: local-only, so it doesn’t lean on someone else’s cloud, and brand-agnostic, so almost any smart device can be centrally connected and monitored. It lives on your own network — a Raspberry Pi, a mini PC, or an old Mac you already have. This started as a hobby and got way out of hand.
With a generous spread of sensors and some easy to build (and/or deep) logic, clever automations can be created to give your house some additional character. Some examples:
- Doorbell camera feed pushed to your TV and phone when someone’s at the front door
- Alerts when movement is detected or a door/window opens while nobody’s home
- Leak, vibration and unusual-activity detection
- Solar and power monitoring — AC set to cool when excess power is being generated
- Front light on ten minutes after sunset, off at 11:30pm – if that’s your jam
- Everything in the house turns off when your phone is placed on charge after 10:30pm – my favourite!
- Laundry fan triggered by the humidity difference inside versus outside
- Local voice control using your own local LLM or via ChatGPT or Claude
Once it’s running, take it over yourself, let the AI agent loose, or let Mac Zen maintain it for you,
In the age of AI, you can manage this yourself much more easily. Ask Mac Zen how this can work for you.
Commercial-grade home networking
Up your home game.
Mac Zen uses and recommends Ubiquiti UniFi — the market leader and perhaps the Apple of the networking world – and the equipment that can handle every scenario you can throw at it,
- Scale the network without reconfiguring anything – up to the size of a sports stadium
- Add WiFi access points to kill dead spots and bandwidth bottlenecks
- Monitor from iOS or a browser
- Intrusion detection & packet monitoring
- Parental controls at the router/gateway for usage quota and domain blocking
- Latest WiFi standards, fast processing, low latency
- Remote monitoring for admins (opt-in)
Unifi very likely has a great product to suit your application.
Network-attached storage for the home
Your very own server hosting all your stuff, securely. If it’s important to you, you want redundant local storage – and backups.
Keep it real, local:
- More drives for redundancy and cheap space
- SSD cache for speed
- Small, medium or large capacity
- 2.5 or 10 Gigabit Ethernet
- Backups to the cloud
- Host all sorts of things on your NAS
- FEEL your backups
Mac Zen can configure your server and, if you want, monitor uptime and alerts on it. If something starts going wrong you’re told before it goes completely belly-up and takes your precious data with it. BTW if your unit starts beeping, and/or warning lights are flashing, call 0411 223 671 immediately!
