Smart Home
I wanted the Iron Man house. So I replaced every light, lock, switch, and sensor in my parents' home and connected it all to an AI running on a GPU in the basement.
// the-why
I really love the idea of an automated home. Like, really. The Jarvis thing. The "lights on when I walk in, doors lock at night, house knows I'm cold before I do" thing. Most people watch Iron Man and think "cool suit." I watched Iron Man and thought "cool house."
So one summer at my parents' place, I bought every Zigbee-compatible device I could find, a Beelink mini PC to run Home Assistant, and told my parents "trust me." They did not fully trust me. But they let me do it anyway.
I spent the next week replacing every light and switch in the house. All the doorknobs. Every window and door sensor. The water lines. TVs, stoves, refrigerators. If it had a wire or emitted a signal, I connected it to Home Assistant.
I also hooked up a door opener for the chicken coop, an automatic fish tank feeder, a pet feeder, and a self-cleaning litter box. Were all of these strictly necessary? No. But the chicken coop door opens at sunrise now, and that brings me joy.
// the-build
376+ connected entities. That's not a typo. Three hundred and seventy-six things, all talking to each other through MQTT and Mosquitto, orchestrated by Home Assistant running in Docker. But the devices are just the surface. Here's what's underneath:
🧠 Local AI — No Cloud, No Subscriptions, No Surveillance
Ollama running on an RTX 3090 inside a Proxmox machine in the basement. Smart enough to manage 376 devices, answer natural language questions about the house, and make context-aware decisions. Zero API costs. Zero data leaving the network. Ever.
🔋 Survives the Apocalypse (Or at Least a Power Outage)
Battery packs on the Proxmox server AND the router. Electricity goes out? Home Assistant stays on. Because a smart home that goes dumb during a blackout is just a house with expensive light switches.
🔒 Fort Knox Networking
The entire system lives inside a Tailscale network — there is literally no way in from the outside internet. IoT devices are isolated on separate VLANs so your smart light bulb can't phone home to China. Iris monitors the whole thing. Google Nest cameras are being ripped out and replaced with open-source cameras running Frigate NVR locally, with face detection.
📄 Every Document, Digitized
Paperless-NGX connected to a scanner with an AI agent that reads every document and receipt. Bank account numbers, old car records, pet vaccination history — scan it once and ask questions forever. My parents just have to feed the scanner.
🤖 AI Did the Boring Parts
An AI agent renamed all 376+ devices, edited the YAML files, built the dashboards, and configured every alert. Who has time to set up 376 things one at a time? Not me. That's what agents are for.
// how-it-works
At night, every door locks itself. My parents control the house through Telegram or voice — "is the garage open?", "turn off the kitchen lights", "what's the temperature in the basement?" The AI just answers.
The garden hoses run on a schedule — but not if it rained. Distance sensors inside the water salt tank tell you the level without checking. Schedules handle everything my parents would otherwise need to remember. Which, at a certain age, is the whole point.
The AI manages the house, tracks every document, monitors the pets. I think it genuinely gets smarter as more data flows through it. My parents went from "I don't trust this" to "can it also do the garden?"
// whats-next
Currently adding a camera pointed at the pantry. The goal: my parents ask "do we have soap?" and get an actual answer with a count. It warns them before things run out. Because nobody should have to open a closet to check if they have paper towels.
The bigger vision: a home that knows where everyone is, learns temperature preferences, adapts to daily routines, and — my mom's request — manages her garden. AI-optimized watering schedules, sunlight tracking, maybe even crop suggestions. No reason a house this smart can't also grow tomatoes.
The goal was never a house with smart devices. It was a house that thinks. We're getting there.