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.
every single sentence was a level of jank that i could never imagine subjecting my parents to. could you code custom firmware for the dlink btw? your fix sounds like good ol' redneck engineering but for the smart home :p
- 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 found a few wifi and bluetooth devices that were cheaper than or didn’t have a zigbee equivalent. Window fan and air monitor specifically.
I didn’t do an exhaustive market search, just sharing my anecdotal experience. It’s a great feeling to be able to focus on hardware capabilities and price, then will the software you envision into existence via AI accelerated RE.
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.
I will be happy when this genre of whining fades away. Everyone has suddenly turned into the most obnoxious 7th grade English teacher imaginable. "I wanted to like your ideas, but you used lines from the reading assignment without quotes and 3 sentences had dangling participles. Plagiarism and grammar offenses, straight to jail."
If you're personally getting a headache from reading AI writing, all this does is transfer that headache to the rest of us. Thanks. /s
It's not missing quotes, it's "i didn't write this at all, I put zero effort into it, I don't know what it says, it may be made up". Claude is good for code, terrible at prose, it boggles my mind that people use it to write PR descriptions, let alone their own personal thoughts.
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.
I disagree. If you asked any Random Customer they don't care if it's local first. They want it to work immediately with as little set up as possible and they want to access it from their phone.
If they could get away without even having a Wi-Fi router and just use their cellular plan they would. Why? Because there are plenty people who are happy with just whatever internet they get on their cell phone and don't want to spend extra for a router and an ISP
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)
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.
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.
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?
:( Your notes are probably more fun to read than the generic AI voice. Your actual notes are fun, but seeing the ~extra cruft from an AI writer in every line irritated me enough to quit before the end.
My personal situation imposes even stricter versions of your #1 and #2:
1. No network, no problem. Anything core to the house has to work with Wi-Fi or automation server shut down.
2. Smart functionality must not remove dumb functionality.
As one example: having a physical switch that controls a light and the switch can be operated by automation is good. Having automation control a light and the switch just tells automation what to do is bad.
This does make things hard sometimes. For instance, your sprinkler controller doesn't pass that bar. In fact the only one I've found so far that has a local API for automation plus full "dumb" on-device control (no Wi-Fi, no app) is RainMachine, and they are gone. If only OpenSprinkler hardware had a touch screen for local UI.
I tried to stick to this philosophy, specifically the part about it working even if my local automation server is down, for a long time. But I finally found an automation case where I wanted functionality where I could not simultaneously have the functionality and have the switch continue working when the server was off.
Specifically, I wanted the switch to turn on different lights depending on the time of day. In the evenings in early morning I wanted it to turn on the dimmer floor lamps, and during the day, I wanted it to turn on the brighter Center room light. This was not possible without turning the switch from a light turning on device, to an automation activating device.
I thought really long and hard about if I was worth the trade off, and in the end I decided that my automation server was only likely to be down for significant periods of time if the power was out and the lights weren't working anyways. If I run into a situation where this becomes a problem for me, I'll reconsider my decision. Which is a great thing about the local control. If I make a decision that I don't like I can just change it.
I've bought multiple internet radios over the decades. The demise of them is always its dependency on a remote server which enables setting which stations you want to listen to.
The remote server always goes away after a couple years go by, and the radio is only capable of playing the stations that were set as presets. Then the preset radio stations go offline, or the URLs for them change.
Basically any appliance is completely ridiculous to require an internet connection imo. When are you going to need to use a stove or dishwasher without being home? What value do you actually get from having a smart fridge that you can view analytics about from your phone?
the only useful thing about a smart fridge is whether if it fails.... i hope it would make a noise. One trick i used was a cheap ble temp sensor in the fridge that would report to the BLE adapter of a tasmota device that sends mqtt messages to grafana. then i would get alerts if it was open or something broken. happened a few times!
Alexa is really convenient. i still think my rules still follow as long as core systems are still controllable offline. Which I really try to achieve through use of tablet on the wall (local wifi is still offline access in my head)
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.
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”?
I just put devices like that on a wifi without internet access. Occasionally I'll need to grant internet access for setup, and then it goes back to being denied. Can't update if you can't download updates.
not all networking has to be routed publicly. many can still operate locally. the catch is, they want your subscription to them, when your devices are required to route publicly.
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.
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.
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.
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
my next iteration i talk about migration to home assistant. at the time i started this process HA was very difficult to use and not flexible enough for me. that has changed.
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.
- 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.
Custom firmware?
1. buy the Zigbee version
2. boom, local only smart home is done
I guess if there's a device that's actually wi-fi only then I'll have to go through your flow but so far there's been no need.
I found a few wifi and bluetooth devices that were cheaper than or didn’t have a zigbee equivalent. Window fan and air monitor specifically.
I didn’t do an exhaustive market search, just sharing my anecdotal experience. It’s a great feeling to be able to focus on hardware capabilities and price, then will the software you envision into existence via AI accelerated RE.
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 personally getting a headache from reading AI writing, all this does is transfer that headache to the rest of us. Thanks. /s
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.
If they could get away without even having a Wi-Fi router and just use their cellular plan they would. Why? Because there are plenty people who are happy with just whatever internet they get on their cell phone and don't want to spend extra for a router and an ISP
My personal situation imposes even stricter versions of your #1 and #2:
1. No network, no problem. Anything core to the house has to work with Wi-Fi or automation server shut down.
2. Smart functionality must not remove dumb functionality.
As one example: having a physical switch that controls a light and the switch can be operated by automation is good. Having automation control a light and the switch just tells automation what to do is bad.
This does make things hard sometimes. For instance, your sprinkler controller doesn't pass that bar. In fact the only one I've found so far that has a local API for automation plus full "dumb" on-device control (no Wi-Fi, no app) is RainMachine, and they are gone. If only OpenSprinkler hardware had a touch screen for local UI.
Specifically, I wanted the switch to turn on different lights depending on the time of day. In the evenings in early morning I wanted it to turn on the dimmer floor lamps, and during the day, I wanted it to turn on the brighter Center room light. This was not possible without turning the switch from a light turning on device, to an automation activating device.
I thought really long and hard about if I was worth the trade off, and in the end I decided that my automation server was only likely to be down for significant periods of time if the power was out and the lights weren't working anyways. If I run into a situation where this becomes a problem for me, I'll reconsider my decision. Which is a great thing about the local control. If I make a decision that I don't like I can just change it.
Unfortunately, almost no lan connected devices sport such an interface.
The remote server always goes away after a couple years go by, and the radio is only capable of playing the stations that were set as presets. Then the preset radio stations go offline, or the URLs for them change.
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.
Also anyone found the fix to smart bulbs constantly “updating”?
__
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.
Something anyone can use.
Also, QR codes as a good UX? I like what you are smoking, it is very effective in disconnecting from reality.
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'm talking about a fully built piece of hardware that comes in every house like plumbing and wiring does
https://x.com/home_assistant/status/2115496455876038961
Thanks for sharing this, I had never heard of home assistant before
The future of smart devices is a local LLM running on every single one.