Hardware Guides
The device pages answer "does this specific thing work?". These guides answer the questions that come before that — which protocol to build on, what infrastructure a purchase quietly assumes, and why two perfectly good sensors can refuse to share a bus. Figures in each guide are computed from the dataset at build time.
Zigbee vs Z-Wave vs Matter: Choosing a Protocol
How the three main smart home radio protocols differ in range, hub requirements and ecosystem size — and how to choose between them for a new setup.
Read the guide →Do You Need a Thread Border Router?
What a Thread border router actually does, which devices count as one, and how to tell whether the Matter device in your basket needs one before it will pair.
Read the guide →I²C Address Conflicts, Explained
Why two sensors can refuse to share a bus, how address strapping works, and the three ways out of a conflict: re-strap, second bus, or multiplexer.
Read the guide →ESP32 vs ESP8266 for ESPHome: Which Board?
Where the ten-year-old ESP8266 still earns its keep, where it runs out of pins, UARTs and ADC channels, and the ESP32 quirk that surprises everyone: ADC2 dies the moment Wi-Fi comes up.
Read the guide →mmWave Radar vs PIR: Choosing a Presence Sensor
PIR sees you move; radar sees you exist. When each one is the right answer, why mmWave ends the lights-go-off-while-reading problem, and every radar and PIR option documented in this index.
Read the guide →Natively Supported vs Bridge Needed: What Our Verdicts Mean
The three compatibility verdicts this site assigns, what each one commits you to in hardware and maintenance, and why "works with" on a box rarely tells you which you are getting.
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