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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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”?

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?

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)

Sounds interesting but bounced off the claudespeak.

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!

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.

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.

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

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 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??

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!

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.

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

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.

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

Something anyone can use.

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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.