ESPHome turned my junk drawer into a smart home
…It's the ultimate digital glue that turns a drawer full of old dev boards and sensors into a high-end, local-only smart home system . Related Curtain automation is fun, but…
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HexOS can finally manage your NAS locally instead of through the cloud, and it fixes its biggest flaw
1d agoI stopped opening Task Scheduler after discovering VS Code's hidden automation layer
2d agoMy local LLM finally understands my house better than Google ever did
1w agoI ditched LM Studio for an open-source alternative — and my local model is doing things it couldn't before
1w agoLocal AI isn't just Ollama—here's the ecosystem that actually makes it useful
…Ditch the Copilot subscription Continue brings local AI directly into VS Code for free One of the handiest ways to use AI is within VS Code, where it automatically completes lines of…
These 4 tools paired with Ollama gave me a private AI workflow that actually matters
…Most of my work already happens on my own devices, so it made sense to have an AI setup that also stays local . That’s what led me to explore self-hosted…
Zigbee solved the smart-home battery problem years ago, and Matter still hasn't
…Stop replacing perfectly functional Zigbee sensors. Keep your battery-reliant infrastructure, such as motion, door, and temperature sensors, and leak detectors, anchored to a high-quality local coordinator, such as a dongle…
I stopped buying smart home gadgets and started building them for a fraction of the price
…Then, I flashed another custom firmware for the new sensor and built another device in less than an hour. What sold me was that every ESP32 device I built worked locally, without…
I automated my entire read-it-later workflow with a local LLM so every article I save gets summarized overnight
…I'm running a local one because it's easier to tie in the automation, plus it's free and private. You could technically use something like ChatGPT or Claude , but it…
I finally built the central AI hub I've been wanting, and Open WebUI made it stupidly simple
…I’ve even paired it with a local n8n server to trigger automation workflows using nothing more than simple commands. The best part? Open WebUI also supports MCP servers, meaning I can…
Stop treating the Raspberry Pi 5 as a smart home hub — it's actually built for something bigger
…The Pi 5 starts to make more sense when the home automation hub becomes part of a wider home lab rather than a single-purpose appliance. The Raspberry Pi 5 starts to…
I asked a local AI to build me a cheat for a popular sandbox game, and only Claude Code could finish the job
…censorship sense. Asking it to code a cheat for Minecraft, the bones of which are quite old, didn't get me very far initially, but the swap to a local AI removed…
My old Pixel does more useful things for my home lab than my current phone ever will
…Use the Tensor chips' TPU via Termux and OpenCore to run local lightweight LLMs for home automation without hitting a cloud API. Your old Pixel can actually run offline voice processing locally…