The AI-Powered Home

Cherryl Anne Menapace is a technology writer and lifelong maker who has spent more than a decade turning ordinary homes into testbeds for intelligent automation. She began her career in technical writing and product documentation, where she learned to translate complex engineering ideas into clear, approachable steps for nontechnical readers — a skill she now applies to the smart home projects she designs and teaches.

Her own smart home began with a single temperature sensor and a spare laptop running automation software, and has since grown into a network of dozens of devices spanning every room — including several she designed and soldered herself. That experience shapes everything she writes: she believes a project should be achievable with modest tools, a little patience, and a willingness to learn by breaking things and fixing them.

An advocate of local-first, privacy-respecting automation, Cherryl writes project guides, teaches hands-on workshops, and contributes to open-source smart home communities. She is passionate about showing beginners that a thinking home is not something you buy but something you build — one sensor, one script, and one carefully considered automation at a time.