I've been messing around with smart home tech for longer than I care to admit, and it's brought me hours of pleasure. Having the perfect smart home automation that makes your life a little bit easier is wonderful, but the process of creating it is arguably even more satisfying.

You can start your smart home journey with as little as a cheap smart plug. Your home will already be smarter, but it can quickly get addictive. One plug becomes five, and before you know it you've decked your home from top to bottom in smart home tech.

New models of smartphones get released on a constant churn, and even if you don't upgrade every year, it's a safe bet that your current phone is not your first. The chances are that you have some old phones lying around your home. The same is probably true of other devices such as tablets and e-readers.

Home Assistant is powerful open-source home automation software that allows you to control a huge number of different smart home devices, regardless of which smart home ecosystem they're designed to work with. You can use it to create powerful automations to make your smart home do almost anything you can think of.

The British science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke famously said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Go back in time 500 years and show them your smartphone, and you'd probably be burned at the stake for being a witch. Even 100 years ago, the things your phone can do would have blown people's minds.