If you've got one of these sitting in a drawer somewhere, don't chuck it away.

If you've got one of these sitting in a drawer somewhere, don't chuck it away. This is an old Amazon Fire tablet and it used to belong to one of my kids. It was slow, full of rubbish and yeah, no one wanted it. So I've completely wiped it, cleaned it, stuck it on the wall and now it's the control center for my house. Let me show you how I use mine. So this is the one that I've got in the kitchen. I've actually got three of these. I've got three kids, so they've all had one at some stage and they're all at varying degrees of age. And you can get fancy holders with nice frames and build them in very beautifully, but this is literally velcro to the wall. It does the job. So I'm using a system called Home Assistant and I have done a couple of videos on that, but YouTube is full of information on it. And basically what that does is it allows me to control all the smart stuff in my house. So essentially, I'll give you a really quick run through. The top three here are door sensors and they are just cheap Tuya sensors which tell me if a door is open or closed. I've got these two here which are thermostats. This one is for the house. I can change it. And this one is for my holiday let, which is essentially 15 miles away, but it's connected remotely so I can control the heating in the shepherd's hut. I've got two room temperature sensors here which actually work in collaboration with our Hive system. So again, they are cheap temperature sensors which are in my kids' room. And when our wood burner isn't doing enough to heat the house in the winter, these alone will engage the heating to heat up their rooms. I've got my Ring doorbell snapshot view here which is a bit rubbish. This is just the weather, obviously. These are my two cameras. It's my front drive and my daughter's room. This is something I've got here with ANPR where it detects registrations that come in the drive. A bit pointless. I'm just toying with it really. This is my solar generation and what's coming in from the grid in terms of power. So now this is just my house. Some people's are insane. Like they're 3D views of the house and you can tap on a room, turn a light on and off. There is so many features. Home Assistant is mad. Check it out. If you like the look of that, check it out because it is just so cool. It's a bit of a rabbit hole that once you go down, you won't come back out of. So anyway, let's get back to why I was actually doing this video. So yeah, I've got three tablets in total. I've got one here. I've got one in my bedroom and the one I showed you outside in the studio is a spare one. So it doesn't have to be a good tablet. It doesn't have to be powerful. It doesn't have to have loads of memory. You're essentially just running a browser. That is just a web address which is linked to my main computer which gives you all this information and enables you to touch it and change things. So it hasn't got to be anything special. Any old tablet that you've got kicking around, you can turn into this. Stick it to the wall. Like I said, if you want to put it in a nice display or something like that, that's totally doable. But I'm just saying, don't throw that old tablet away because there is a use for it. So essentially, these went from being old kids' tablets which we didn't use and we wouldn't have got a lot of money for if we sold them to something that we now use every single day.