A smart home that works offline
The heart of the house is a Home Assistant instance with roughly 2,600 entities across 41 domains — lights, heating, air quality, presence, cameras, security, the car and energy. It runs as its own VM, locally, vendor-neutral and with no forced cloud. If the internet drops, the house keeps working, and the data never leaves the network.
One VM, 2,600+ entities
Home Assistant runs as a dedicated KVM VM on the N150 (not in Docker), with a passed-through Zigbee dongle. Deliberately separated from the rest of the stack so HAOS updates stay clean — vendor-neutral across dozens of integrations.
Presence, not switches
Radar presence sensors detect room by room whether someone is actually there — lights and extractor fans react to presence instead of motion. In total, 43 automations run, from "welcome home" to "all lights off."
Heating & air quality
Seven HomematicIP thermostats regulate each room to a target temperature; scripts nudge them all up or down by 1 °C. Three VeSync purifiers measure PM2.5, and the average plus trend sensors land on the dashboard.
23 Shelly plugs with power metering
Smart plugs measure consumption per device — and detect from the power drop when the washing machine or dishwasher is done, push notification included. Total draw runs as a live value and a 30-day average.
AI by voice
Alexa forwards voice commands to Home Assistant; a custom skill controls devices through Claude as the primary assistant, with Google Gemini as a fallback. A counter logs every fallback — self-learning device mapping included.
Hardware telemetry via MQTT
The Windows workstation reports CPU/GPU temperature and load via MQTT to the Mosquitto broker — auto-discovery makes the sensors appear by themselves. Dashboards and automations react to real hardware values.
The car is included too
The car’s fuel level and lock state land on the dashboard; if it is left unlocked, a warning goes to the phone. A tracker also shows current fuel prices nearby.
Local first, controlled from outside
Automations run on the home network and need no internet. Access from outside takes the same controlled path as every other service — with strong sign-in and a second factor.