The dream of a smart home has been with humanity ever since The Jetsons aired in 1962. Lights that know when you walk in, thermostats that learn your schedule, speakers that answer to your every word…

And for a while it seemed that we were living in that future. Apart from the flying cars, we had smart speakers, voice assistants, clever lights, and homes warmed to Goldilocks levels of perfection.

What we increasingly had to think about was that every light bulb, smart plug, connected switch, and speaker is talking to the internet. They chat away to a range of companies, from small operations in China to massive US tech behemoths and everywhere in between.

In 2023, a House of Commons Committee report stated that 77% of UK adults own at least one smart home device, and that, on average, there are nine such devices in every UK home.

That’s a lot of chatter going to data centres. All of these devices phone home to analytics servers, send telemetry to manufacturers, and pass DNS queries through a variety of third-party infrastructure. Folks agree to all of this through T&Cs that they never read.

Privacy first

Running a Raspberry Pi is a great way to fix all of this mess; with Home Assistant, you can build a privacy-first smart home hub. In this month’s issue of Raspberry Pi Official Magazine, Ben Everard shows us his local smart home that keeps his data away from manufacturers’ floaty clouds.

It’s not just about tinfoil on the head, though. It’s much better to set up your own system and understand what’s going on inside your home. One of my favourite authors, Jeanette Winterson, said: “if you want to keep your own teeth, make your own sandwiches”. It’s important to know what’s going into a system if you want to stay digitally healthy.

What’s great about all of this — especially at the moment — is that you don’t really need a powerful Raspberry Pi 5 with 16GB of RAM to run a home network. In fact, an older Raspberry Pi 4 with a lot less RAM is perfectly powerful enough to manage your home.

We’ve also got a bunch of other projects in this issue that work on Raspberry Pi 4/400. Another privacy project that works really well on Raspberry Pi 4 is Pi-hole. I mention this because Raspberry Pi has been training a chatbot partially on our magazines, so I decided to do some digging into our analytics to find out what your favourite tutorials are — and it turns out that Pi-hole is really, really popular. So you can look forward to a refreshed tutorial on that in the near future. We do listen! 

I hope that the AI data centre roll-out calms down soon, and that we can get devices at reasonable prices again. (I was hoping to buy a Steam Machine but suspect it’s going to be extravagantly expensive.) In the meantime, at least you can use low-cost Raspberry Pi computers to keep your personal information in a data store all of your own making.

Issue 167 of Raspberry Pi Official Magazine is out now!

If you liked this article, there are many more like it in the latest issue of Raspberry Pi Official Magazine. You can purchase a copy from the Raspberry Pi Store in Cambridge. It’s also available from our online store, which ships around the world. And you can get a digital version via our app on Android or iOS.

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