Smart home reviews written by engineers, for engineers
TinkerTok exists because most smart home content is written by people who have never looked at a configuration.yaml file. We're engineers who automate our own homes, publish all our code publicly, and write about what actually works — not what PR teams want you to buy.
Who's behind this?
Network & Systems Engineer
~15 years in infrastructure, networking, and systems automation. The same skills that manage enterprise networks apply directly to Home Assistant — latency matters, reliability matters, and vendor lock-in is a liability.
My home runs 60+ Zigbee devices, 12 ESPHome sensors, custom Node-RED flows, and a Raspberry Pi 5 HA instance that has never needed cloud access to function. All configs are on GitHub.
Our test stack
Every product is tested against the same home automation stack before being reviewed.
Home Assistant OS
Running on a Raspberry Pi 5 with NVMe SSD
Zigbee2MQTT
SONOFF Dongle Plus-E coordinator, 60+ devices
ESPHome
Custom sensors, energy monitoring, presence detection
Node-RED
Complex automation flows and webhook integrations
GitHub
All automations and configs published publicly
No Cloud. Ever.
WAN port can be unplugged — everything still works
How we operate
We buy our own gear
Every product reviewed on TinkerTok was purchased at retail price. We accept no manufacturer samples, review units, or sponsored placements. If a product is bad, we say so.
We publish the raw data
Latency numbers, device counts, mesh stability tests — we show the methodology and the numbers, not just "it was fast." You can replicate our test setup with the same tools.
Local control is non-negotiable
If a device requires a cloud subscription to operate its core functions, it does not appear in our Best Of picks. Period. We cover devices that keep working when the internet goes down.
Open source first
We prioritize devices with open-source firmware (ESPHome, Tasmota, Zigbee2MQTT) or open local APIs (Shelly). Vendor lock-in is a bug, not a feature.
Affiliate links fund this site
We earn a small commission when you buy via our Amazon links. This does not change our recommendations — we link to what we actually use and recommend. See our full disclosure.
Why we only cover local-first devices
Amazon Echo, Google Nest, and Apple HomePod all route your voice commands through cloud servers — even for simple commands like turning off your lights. Every command is uploaded, logged, and used to train models or target ads.
Smart home should mean your home gets smarter, not that a corporation gets more data about when you wake up, what temperature you keep your house, and how often you're home.
Local control isn't just a privacy preference — it's also faster (sub-10ms latency vs 200–500ms cloud round-trip), more reliable (works when internet is down), and future-proof (no risk of the vendor killing the cloud service).