Bought our home almost 20 years ago, and the former owner (apparently) owned a now-defunct home automation business. The upside was 100% X10/Insteon power and light controls, top alarm panel, environmental controls and so on running off of a wall-mounted "SmartLinc" touch panel. I expanded the system with Axis cameras and a Mac Server running Indigo and SecuritySpy (non-subscription), which enabled remote monitoring and control, but it all operates locally.

In a moment of weakness, I bought a D-Link wireless (wifi) water detector for the sump pit (it was on clearance for $30); it relied on a D-Link Home cloud service (free) that was closed down a few years ago.

Not wanting to toss it, I repurposed a spare Chromebook 14 that I was going to recycle and turned it into a Alpine monitor for the water detector, which I'm powering from the Chromebook's USB port (if power is lost in a rainstorm, I need to know about it before the sump pit fills up).

An immediate issue was that the D-Link firmware tried to "phone home" every 24 hours and would drop from the local network, since the server was kaput, and I had no clue what response it was expecting from the server to keep it alive. Solution; "reboot" the unit by interrupting USB power (with a Pico and MOSFET) every 23 hours. There's no question that home automation should work without the internet.

HomeAssistant publishes "IoT Class" for all of it's integrations ranging from "Local Push" to "Cloud Polling": https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2016/02/12/classifying-th...

I only use "Local Polling" or better, and highly prefer "Local Push".

The new rules I have come to use are:

- buy the cheapest hardware that gets the job done

- ignore negative reviews that are software related

- upon receipt of devices, ask claude for local-first cfw

- have fun for a few hours acting as a meat proxy

- boom, cheap local-only smart home is done

Use a SBC or nas for home assistant. This process worked for me for switches, a thermostat, an air quality monitor, a thermometer, and a window fan.

Would’ve paid ~2.5x for hardware that had the appropriate local-first capability out of the box. Instead this all fit within an existing $20 subscription to an inference provider. DS 4.1 running locally was on track too just more slowly.

I have some simple but strict rules:

1. Commercial devices must use offline only protocols, Zigbee or Zwave. If it's WiFi only I will not buy it unless the firmware is open source or easily replaced with an open source, local only alternative.

2. Non-sensor devices must fully function without their IoT features. I must be able to control my thermostat, fridge, stove, etc without any external interface.

Never use a WiFi IoT device that isn't open source. Even if you can control it locally it could be a spy device that's exfiltrating your data. Yes, you could setup VLANs or a separate network but it's not worth it. Vote with your wallet.

Please please please use your first draft or refine it yourself without LLMs.

I managed to get to:

The cloud is the weak link

- No internet, no problem. ...

---

If you are writing for other machines to ingest it, whatever. But if you are writing for people it for me at least signals that you don't really care about the message that you want to get across, and are fine with a watered down LLM average.

If you're interested in this topic, Stacey Higginbotham at Consumer Reports has done a lot of great reporting on this subject:

https://innovation.consumerreports.org/category/iot/

Disclaimer: I contributed to this report on the subject: https://innovation.stage.consumerreports.org/How-to-Build-Lo...

The local only requirement has always been a very strong reason I've never gotten around to dabbling in home automation in any serious way. All the stuff at most department stores phone home as far as I can tell. The research investment or other frigging about (e.g.: some fiddly method to flash Tasmota) has left me reluctant.

But I was looking at a couple of spare RPis I had laying around and decided to whack Home Assistant on one, just to take a look. I've now decided to dip my toe a bit further and ordered a Zigbee USB adapter, some Zigbee based buttons and reed switches, plus a couple of Matter based power switches which I hope will all work happily.

I'll also need to setup an IOT VLAN in my Openwrt router. (Not a networking guy, so also fiddly!)

Until now, my home automation endeavours have consisted of:

- A red, flashing LED glued into the ceiling near the front door that is connected to a reed switch to tell when the garage door is open.

- A light switch¹ which I managed to flash Tasmota onto so I can switch the lounge room lights on or off from the TV remote.

- An ultrasonic distance sensor that sits on top of my monitor that can tell when I'm sitting in front of my computer². It pauses the music and resumes when I leave and come back. It also nags me if I've been in front of the computer too long.

¹ I see no value in automated light bulbs. I want automated light switches. Unfortunately Australian electrical certification standards are something of a bear that make this difficult.

² https://www.michevan.id.au/posts/are-you-there/

1. Buy zigbee/zwave 2. Prefer things you can flash tasmota if zigbee/zwave is not possible. 2. Maybe use eMudhra for mitm and flash the unsupported devices.

We've backed ourselves into a fundamentally silly situation: inventions intended to improve convenience and save time don't do either. They work "OK" then there's an update, and then you need to figure out what changed and how. And then it breaks, and you need to go troubleshoot what still works (if anything) and what no longer works. It's not more convenient, just more complex.

> AI;DR: I wrote the first draft, AI helped me edit and rewrite it, and I made the final pass. The rules, setups, and talks are my own.

I like that disclaimer. Looks like a good way to declare AI content.

FYI for security type cameras - you don't have to put up with phone-home behaviour if your camera is supported by Thingino https://thingino.com/

This provides an open source firmware. I bought a super cheap Sonoff camera with dreadful software and I was at my wits end until I found out that one could reflash the firmware with open source.

I think that open source is the way - or writing your own. I had a greenhouse last year and everything died in it every year during winter but last year I made a raspberry-pi controller (with a relay) for a simple space heater which would turn on at the very coldest time of the morning and just barely bounce the temperature above 0. I got a nice graph out of it that showed me the effect and I could tune it to be as minimal and cheap with electricity as was safe. That's the first year everything survived and I had a fantastic set of plants in spring before they'd normally have made it.

This year the trouble and strife wanted a driveway and the greenhouse was in the way. So as is normal in life something only works for it to be cancelled.

There is hope: customers want this, and if they do, PM's will consider that even if it conflicts with some of the internal strategy of services etc. especially if the services revenues are meagre.

There is intense competition in all these spaces.

What is necessary is a 'name' to the movement. Just like IoT engendered an entire wave - a concept that dissolved into analysts, CEOs, PM, strategy, industry etc. to create it, the 'No Connection Required' could easily do the same if there is a core concept and language to define it.

Analysts will write papers, CEOs will read them, conference panels will be had, Twitter discussions will erupt, PMs want to justify their roadmaps, CEOs want to please the board, new products will launch into the category - and it can happen.

Often these things need an impetus to help spark the change, like security breaches etc. which is 'du jour' right now. A handful of articles about security problems, some big media coverage, and a few breakthrough products at the margins could create the wave. I think there is a lot of legitimacy behind this.

Author here. This is ten years of home automation rules, led by one: nothing core should depend on a vendor's server. Setup core is Tasmota, MQTT and Node-RED on a Pi. I've given this talk a few times and started working on a third for the agentic era. What's the most pointless internet dependency you've found in a device?

Write your congress people. That's the only way this happens - manufacturers don't want to invest more into these products, and they don't want to give you a way of opting out of data collections.

KNX is the solution. Look it up. Local first and by default. You own the equipment. It isn’t subject to any one company or manufacturer. You own it and control it!

This is why I hate the IoT (Internet of Things) it should be CoT (Communication of Things).

That speaker linked to your phone should not need an internet proxy to communicate. It should allow for direct USB communication so it can share one power source. It should allow for Bluetooth communication so it can be in a different close location.

CoT should follow the rule of nature and take the shortest path by default.

What is better for society? The LLM modal running in a local environment or the one running on a data center that can be easily taken out via a power outage, fiber cut, national disaster, or a kinetic weapon?

I rather that LLM modal used at the hospital be ran locally and keep servicing patients even though the original data center was demolished by mother nature.

This comes at an interesting time: I've been working on building my own home networking solution, based on Bluetooth Mesh. It's amazing how many real-life questions and issues you encounter on the way, especially related to networks and servers being unavailable.

The reason I'm doing that is because seemingly nobody managed to solve this yet and I'm tired of everything out there requiring an internet connection and an account, and (inevitably) becoming a marketing channel for pushing upsells and offers to me.

However, it's definitely not simple, and most of the complexity lies in making sure the system works. Building a Wi-Fi controlled light bulb with a remote is easy. Building a system of lights with switches that works is hard.

I totally agree, and if you asked consumers, most would care and prefer for their smart home devices to communicate as little as possible with the outside world. And yet the market keeps offering invasive products, the discrepancy is frustrating.

There should be a system like the nutritional information on food and beverage products, as time went by most people read those and choose accordingly, which then incentivize companies to adapt their offering. We could imagine something similar which would define clearly the capabilities of the hardware or software sold, clearly labelled on the physical package or on the online shop with an easy classification for consumers to understand.

Thread devices have been great for me. It’s a self-healing mesh that survives the internet going down, the hub going down, circuit breakers being tripped, and even a full power outage so long as you can keep one device powered that is capable of being a Thread router (pretty much all devices that don’t rely on their own battery).

Last winter we had a long power outage. So I used a Jackery to power a smart plug as a temporary router and the mesh reconfigured itself and everything just worked. Battery powered door & window sensors, flood sensors, some lights like Eve Flare, and even the Eve Aqua water valve, which meant I could literally water the garden straight from the phone during a power outage (the iPhone has a built-in Thread radio).

Obviously it would be better to have a whole house battery, but that was so cool and took almost zero effort.

I have always only bought HomeKit compatible smart home devices as those have always worked offline. They also tend to just be much better than the general cheap crap that I see amazon pushing.

100% agree. Home Assistant is the brain of my smart house and my rule has been, for over a decade now, that all smart devices should fail back to being dumb and anyone in my house should be able to use the house without an instruction manual.

In practice this looks like Z-wave smart switches everywhere for lights so that you can control the light via automation, app, the switch on the wall, or Alexa. They all feed into the same system.

LLMs have made this even easier and removed some of the annoying fiddling I used to do in the past. Now I can open up Claude Code and tell it to build a new automation and it's done in minutes.

Yesterday I realized I left the floodlight on in the backyard by accident, not problem "Claude, create an automation in home assistant to turn off backyard light 5 minutes after I turn it on", done. Could I have created that automation? Yes, I've written countless of them in that past but now I can speak it into existence and, almost more importantly, tweak it with barely any effort at all. If tomorrow I buy a motion sensor I can just ask the LLM to incorporate that, if I want the lights to stay on if X other device is turned on, it's a prompt away.

In the past I would spend a good bit of time writing an automation but when it broke down or my needs changed it was enough friction that I would just give up and turn off the automation rather than take the time to debug and change it. I setup all the motion-activated lights in my house when I first moved in and over the course of a few weeks I tweaked each one as needed with just a short prompt here or there, it felt like living in the future.

Smart home devices should stay on the shelf.

All this life-force expended calling for the market to provide something no normie wants. If you go no-cloud you get to also manage a fragile controller device, and you have to spend extra time researching what to buy and also spend more time when the devices break (which happens an order of magnitude more often than non-smart equivalents) and then your most basic home devices need to reboot for a firmware update just when you go to use them?

Get back from vacation whoops controller died nothing works?

Go to work whoops controller's hard drive filled up with logs now it doesn't work family home is freezing, tech support time? Better cancel that client demo!

How many hand-lightswitch-flips and thermostat hand-adjustments could you have done in the time you spent on this?

The only thing that'll ever make smart crap worth it, is fixing the law - and enforcing the laws that are yet to be enacted - so we can trust the companies we buy from.

Our generation is too naive to do that. So it's a couple decades from happening.

Until then, opt out.

I'm even stricter. Devices, especially critical ones must work without any network at all. I must be able to turn on the lights or start HVAC when my server is down. So, all critical devices must have some kind of physical button that turns them on/off. This way, if it's winter and both me and disks on my NAS are dead, my family won't freeze to death while waiting for serviceman to come and replace switch in the heater.

I wish Insteon had gotten more popular, Back in the day it was easy to get development material to write your own software or build your own devices. I really liked how the stuff all had a decent amount of capability on its own, or you could have a computer attached for more advanced automation. I still use a few Insteon things in my house, Still use a few X10 things for that matter. I really wish they had kept up their local support software.

I just went on a little side quest this weekend.

My only IoT device is a motorized chicken door that was acquired on Mac.bid, I think (one of those auction sites for returned goods), and requires some crummy app (SmartLife) that takes up half a gig on my phone.

Long story short, I had to go on a journey that involved creating a Tuya developer account and navigating their terrible website and being panicked at my ability to reconnect the device, but eventually I landed on Homebridge connecting it to Apple Home, and I finally have the control over it that I want. I finally was able to block the device from the Internet in my Deco app.

So...yes! It's finally working without the Internet.

I've always avoided IoT because of terrible software and silos but now that apparently these aren't the barriers they used to be thanks to LLM assistance, I'm more likely to dip my toes in the water.

The radio one is wild. The station moves to a new URL and a perfectly good radio has no way to play it. Makes me wonder how how many "works offline" devicies you could actually set up again after a factory reset if the company shut down its servers.

Maintenance is the real problem, especially when you have devices that speak different protocols (Zigbee, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth).

That’s probably why manufacturers prefer to keep users in their own ecosystems.

Back when I first started automating my home, I didn't feel like messing with Home Assistant and finding server-side hardware that was compatible with it, so I got a Hubitat with Zwave (and a few Zigbee) devices. I keep meaning to look at Home Assistant again, I'm sure it's easier to set up, but the Hubitat has been pretty rock solid and pretty much "set it and forget it", with no cloud dependencies for general automation, it works fine when the internet is down.

Though I did run into a roadblock with my Blueair air purifier and hubitat, so I'll probably run a Home Assistant instance so I can control the Blueair with the HomeAssistant->Hubitat integration.

I wish they could work without the internet.

But manufacturers want our data harvested through those devices *and* your mobile phone app.

And they want a way to force you to pay for the service.

So we basically pay to let them spoil us.

I have an electronic “fireplace” that relied on Tuya. Last weekend Claude Code walked me through getting a token from the Tuya dev platform and wrote a homebridge device for me so I can control the device in HomeKit. Gave the fireplace a static IP and firewalled it from the internet.

Pretty amazing the smart parrot can un-China/Cloud something like this in about 20-30 min. Prior to that I was expecting to need an IR blaster to try to control the thing with HomeKit and a complicated setup maintaining state. That’s all just solved now.

I will take an even simpler version of this

Smart home devices should not freeze up whenever internet is down. A device like Google Nest should have the minimum decency to allow you to interact with it via local Wifi (which continues un-interrupted). It is fine if half the functionality doesn't work. It is fine if the "AI" doesn't work, but at least allow me to fcking change the temperature manually

Same thing with devices like Google Wifi which freezes up or run hot loops like headless chickens when internet is down.

I can't keep blaming these for-profit companies. We can shame and boycott the worst of them but if their operating environment doesn't change new ones will keep popping up. We have to speak collectively with our wallets or speak up so governments govern practices. It could help if our feeds were more informative than dopamine slot machines so getting that changed is high on the list.

What this post describes is a long forgotten concept of progressive enhancement. A smart switch should provide "smart" functionality on top of "dumb" or rather essential/core functionality of a switch rather than only provide "smart" functionality without a fallback to the core functionality when e.g.. Internet is down

ANYTHING that does not absolutely need to be online, like looking at current news, current weather or such, should work without internet. Especially appliances. The more difficult it is to change it, the less dependent should it be of any cloud infrastructure. Anything built in the walls, must not depend on internet. Same for car functions, if a car should be good for 10 to 20 years.

Home appliances should use open standards, allowing anyone to use any software to control them, including their firmware.

I built some personal projects that involved devices like this.

I have every incentive to keep it local. Yet I connect it to a host on the internet. It turns out that it is convoluted and less reliable to have local servers and stuff....

The stupidest ideas of all time include thermostats and alarm systems that require WAN access and cell phone apps on the LAN, during extended power outages. Arguably anything essential in your house (or your car, or life in general) that requires an internet connection is broken by design.

I recently had a pretty extensive home renovation don after a kitchen fire--which din't have a lot direct damage but the rouse was pretty much cleared out. I pretty much didn't have any direct "smart" stuff. A few appliances are probably enableable but they aren't.

How does the WiFi wall switch work? If WiFi goes down you can still click a light on and off? This is tempting as I have to leave all my smart lights on rn but do I really need to rip out all my light switches? Ugh.

Also anyone found the fix to smart bulbs constantly “updating”?

ev chargers are the worst case of this imo. a lot of them only do the off-peak schedule through the vendor app, so if the cloud goes away you end up charging at peak. on some time-of-use plans that's ~$500 a year for the same car

Please stop connected devices smart. Analog offline are better in other aspects.

The Eve home products seem to be a nice compromise between usability and privacy / independence- I just wish they had a broader portfolio.

As someone making a smart device, I can attest, it's not even that hard too, just make an MCP server so someone can use it with their local AI

Richard Stallman predicted this.

You were warned.

If you accept and thus consented to a computer, or a device with a computer in it, without first verifying you can write to the media of its software, control the boot process, and will have sufficient access to that software, you get what you consented to.

And, you deserve it.

AFAIK Shelly devices require internet only if you do require its usage, and are happy with local IPs or bluetooth connections otherwise. I have two, driving the irrigation system, that once configured were locked in a basement with no signal and are still to this day doing their scheduled task.

Anything "smart" should work without the internet. Including Claude Code.

everything I buy will work without internet for sure, and all of the above is much better with Home Assistant at the helm controlling things (only issue is the constant updates which you have to keep on top of)

Use a open-source LLM model locally

I had a chuckle when I saw “ AI;DR “ nice will use it.

I know this is an exotic opinion... but just look at commercial installation. There you will see automation, but no IOT gadgets, no home assistant and no internet thermostats.

The answer is KNX. This system gives local only building automation, from lights, automatic blinds and temperature monitoring. I've had this for over 10 years now and there is still a large group of manufacturers with compatible devices. Closing the blinds on the windows where too much sun is shining in - that should not require a full computer running.

But I know... Unattractive due to upfront installation cost... And no business model to sell disposable gadgets to the consumer, no vendor lock in ... Boooo

They should also work over wires. The wireless signals can have interference and mesh protocols like Zigbee are basically a pet you have to keep an eye on. I've yet to find a good wired home automation system. I think PoE in all the walls might be a direction or otherwise USB PD in all the wall. Or something older and simpler that has gone out of fashion.

I don't know about you, but whenever someone calls something "smart" I usually know in advance that it's anything but. If you have to call it "smart" just so people will find it useful, then you usually know they've been sold a lie. I mean, there are exceptions, but most of these things usually make easy things harder, or it takes longer to get things long with them due to some latency, than just using some old school, manual, analog technology. Usually, but not always. Please enlighten me on where I'm wrong. Love to hear it!

I live in such a more simple reality then a lot of people whom posts like this resonate with. I literally have two things hooked to the Internet in my house: my phone and laptop. Everything in my life functions fine, and I have just as much free time as most people as far as I can tell, and that's without a dishwasher. I do have a good assortment of scrubbers though...

If it requires internet access, it isn't smart. It is stupid. But for some reason they hijacked the term smart.

There's entire legions of people who consider themselves Christians. But I notice very little, if any, compassion for those in need: the neighbors, the ill, the refugees, or even the children.

Same with DoD -> DoW, and AI -> super intelligence. I wish I was making those up, alas.

I'm not really sure what this is doing on HN tbh, as it reads like 2018 entry-level IoT talking points, but it's 2026 now, but regardless of that.

__

I suspect that for resilience reasons alone, we might see a shift towards connecting less stuff to the public internet.

Not because consumers would complain. No one cares about consumers - including consumers themselves. But because of the threat to the stability of the system, internet connected stuff poses.

The fridge meltdowns are an example of that, but you can equally stun an enemy economy by just messing with the smart lights in people's homes, as it is the people who work.. or don't because they're tired.

I couldn't connect a matter device to my Home assistant via an Android app on GrapheneOS because it relies on Google Play Services. So much for the open standard!

If they can work without the internet, how TF do I scrape your data and sell it for a hefty profit? I made the equipment cheap so that everyone wants to buy it!

Oh I also have a under-the-table contract with some intelligence community for some backdoors. You know it's a lot more expensive for them to actually send someone to test physical security, than just pay a contractor to sit before the desk collecting data, right? RIGHT??

EVERYTHING SHOULD WORK WITHOUT THE INTERNET. Yes somethings are purely internet and that's fine, but YOUR DEVICES, your phone, smart things, tvs, gadgets, anything that runs on something that executes code should be made to work if the server upstream goes kaput and then offer open apis to make them work. I have been lucky with the wired cameras and the tplink light switches that there is a python implementation to work with them, kasa it's called. EVERYTHING connected to internet in order to work is subject to enshitification, down to your friking playstation where sony decided to just remove your movies, or no more dvds. WHY THE SOLAR PANELS HAVE TO CONNECT TO INTERNET TO WORK? and then friking claude is too "pure" to write a mock for whatever they are contacting so 40k$ dolars of hardware can keep working... What a time to be alive! LOL

Maybe I don’t understand this stuff because I live in a small SF apartment and not a McMansion. But this stuff just feels like it would over complicate my life for no real gain.

Sounds interesting but bounced off the claudespeak.

I would be fine with an open spec for long term maintenance even if the company goes defunct. Or pulls the sort of bullshit Google did with Nest. Anyone involved in that who might be reading this can kindly go fuck themselves with a chainsaw. Twice.

And if I were the king of the forest, all medium to large appliances would run a controller board that is pin compatible with either arduino or raspberry pi so that the hobbyist community can refurbish devices that experienced a short. I won’t even make everyone pick a single standard. Two or maybe even three (ESP) are fine as long as we aren’t doing all custom just to count down a timer, run a pump, and sense water levels all at the same time.

Maybe not a space heater but dishwashers for sure. I’m divided stand mixers. Someone more invested could sway me either way.

hola

I've waited for Internet-connected devices to get better but honestly, the experience continues to be terrible. A few anecdotes:

1. I bought some highly-rated smart plugs on Amazon. They make their own Wifi network to connect to to configure. Never got them to work. They're sitting in a box somewhere;

2. I bought a new LG washer/dryer that happened to be Internet connected. I tried to connect them. They simply wouldn't connect to my home network. After some hours I figured it was a DHCP issue, possibly them expecting an address in a certain range? They just timed out with a meaningless error. I could get them to work over a mobile hotspot though; and

3. I've bought a couple of Sonos devices over the years and I honestly don't think I'd buy another. I used to try and stream themed "radio" stations over a variety of services (eg iHeartRadio). What would inevitably happen is there would be a minor glitch in the network and it would stop playing. I'd have to manually restart it. Why can't the software do this? I don't know if this is the fault of Sonos or the third-party integration. It's probably the latter. Either way, it just left me with the impression that this is not a polished product.

Also, Sonos at that time had to create and use its own 2.4GHz network even though it was Ethernet connected. Why? It's just... lazy.

As bearing as I am on AI in general, I actually expect this to get better with the likes of REA [1]. People are going to make better versions of what is objectively horrible software that the companies have no interest in fixing or improving.

I follow some smart home integrators (ie people who do this for a living) and the general advice I get is:

1. Use Ubiquiti for APs, cameras and locks; and

2. Use Lutron for lighting where possible. There are 20+ year old Lutron systems that still work perfectly today.

All the common consumer brands (eg Philips Hue) are just toy junk, basically.

[1]: https://github.com/morluto/rea

I made a game about this a couple years ago, which made it to front page of HN! https://smarthome.steviep.xyz

This would have been a great presentation without the AI prose.

> Below that is the chart from a few real days: 21 opens, with spikes showing when each one happened. Most people skip this part, and it’s the part that tells me whether I left the garage open without opening an app.

seriously?

Lawl. Dream on. Would you like to subscribe to our scissor subscription service? First you need to download our scissor app and connect your bank accounts. Be sure to opt in to marketing emails.

And it usually does, but it’s a ton of effort. I have tons of devices, so far things that don’t work is Wyze camera and Mova (Dreame) vacuum. Midea, Tuya, Qingping, Deye, Aqara and bunch of others have Home Assistant integration over LAN and you can cut off WAN access via your router.

The smarts to run a smart home should live inside the house like an appliance.

Something anyone can use.

Would it not be useful if we as a community could maintain a repository of mocked services that can run locally and provide to the iot devices exactly the responses they expect when "phoning home"? Bonus if the data the iot devices provide is then made available to the local network.

Software stack: if you don't want to spend too much time tinkering with the software, go for something simple like HomeAssistant with nothing else around and you will be just fine. For most people any software is more hassle than they desire, all the extreme customizations are not really needed. If you feel so special, home automation is not that special, not if you want mass adoption and convenience.

Agree! 100%

I recently moved into a new house where I went all in with automating and measuring everything. Every single door and window has a sensor. Every single appliance: switch, light, TV, computer and devices like wasmachines, garage doors, heatpumps, invertors, ovens, air filters is made smart and connected to my home assistant. I never ever saw the ui of home assistant. Everything is done with Claude and it works absolutely perfect. It would be a fulltime job to figure everything out manually. Also many devices like our heating floor manifold do not come with a build in Ethernet or wifi connector. I extensively used AI to connect an esp directly to its board. Once you got the Rx and tx working, Claude can reverse engineer the data streams and build a driver/integration for home assistant. AI is really super awesome here. Zero need for Cloud based crap like Tuya or smart devices requiring a cloud service account.

> Nothing core in my house depends on a vendor’s server.

How would you know?

Unless it's law or AI becomes capable of rooting every device, it will never happen, most hardware gets out of the door with minimally functional software that only covers the immediate business need.

The internet is not the weak link, the internet is a security nightmare. You don't want a Chinese guy shut you off because all your Tuya devices can be controlled by them. You don't even want a random hacker to set your fridge to heat, like the recent France incidents.

Also, QR codes as a good UX? I like what you are smoking, it is very effective in disconnecting from reality.

I think a smart home hub of sorts should be something you can install in any home, like a water heater or an internet router. The hub connects to your wifi and manages all of your smart devices. You register your devices with it using a web interface that is only just like configuring a router

The web interface part would be the really complex piece I think. You would have to have some way for devices to tell it what features they have, so it could dynamically produce the appropriate controls per device

I dunno if this is really feasible to actually build but it's one of the only ways I can think that would allow average non-technical people to do this without having to administrate their own hardware and network settings and such

"I do use some cloud services, mostly Alexa and a few AWS ones. Alexa is just another way to flip a switch."

So he is still dependent on big US corporations. I think the whole post would be better if he'd manage to really be even more independent.

I hope that 3D printing will reach a stage for that eventually. Once we can 3D print a 3D printer that can then 3D print almost everything, we have won.

Why? The internet is always on, when it’s off, you have bigger problems than your home automation not working.

I absolutely agree. If anything should work without the internet, it's:

1. smart home devices

2. your children's toys

3. your Siri when you ask to find something in your phone

and yet here we are. No internet? Siri can't find anything in your phone.

Oh my favorite is how Spotlight seems to randomly fail to find local files it was easily able to find yesterday, and starts searching the web instead.

Decades ago who would’ve thought that a computer could fit in the palm of your hand.

The future of smart devices is a local LLM running on every single one.