Yet another Hacker News

Smart home devices should work without the internet

26 points skittleson 1 hour ago 18 comments

skittleson 1 hour ago | parent

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?

guhcampos 38 minutes ago | parent

This is absolutely great stuff, but I think I caught you red-handed there. Alexa Routines break your fundamental rule!

bluefirebrand 36 minutes ago | parent

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?

tomcatfish 32 minutes ago | parent

:( 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.

diggernet 4 minutes ago | parent

Love your rules.

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.

hypfer 37 minutes ago | parent

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.

bluefirebrand 30 minutes ago | parent

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

throwaway219450 23 minutes ago | parent

You have described Home Assistant. That’s exactly how it works, including offline if you need it and auto discovery of devices on the network.

bluefirebrand 14 minutes ago | parent

Home assistant would be similar to the software side of things sure

I'm talking about a fully built piece of hardware that comes in every house like plumbing and wiring does

iAMkenough 12 minutes ago | parent

Home Assistant sells hub devices with various connectivity radios, including the newest one they’re announcing tomorrow.

https://x.com/home_assistant/status/2115496455876038961

bluefirebrand 5 minutes ago | parent

Cool, I guess I'm not alone in thinking this is a valuable and useful thing

Thanks for sharing this, I had never heard of home assistant before

skittleson 2 minutes ago | parent

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.

augment_me 30 minutes ago | parent

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.

skittleson 4 minutes ago | parent

got it, the first draft was a set of rough notes but i can clean up today.

reasonabl_human 21 minutes ago | parent

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.

threethirtytwo 8 minutes ago | parent

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.