Smart home devices should work without the internet

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. ...

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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.

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?

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'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.

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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.