A dead-cloud burglar alarm brought back to life, nineteen smart devices freed from their apps, a 12.6 kWp solar array read live, and an old tablet reborn as a wall panel — all orchestrated locally on a single Pi, with nothing phoning home. Orchestrated by Kevin; driven — keyboard and SSH — by Claude Code.
The manufacturer's cloud died years ago and took the alarm's alerts with it. We reverse-engineered its local radio protocol and gave it a new brain — phone alerts, voice control and a full sensory intruder response. Read & try it →
One Pi, dual-homed across two networks, running everything: Tuya, a reverse-engineered Bluetooth bulb mesh, Nanoleaf, Ring, a live Victron solar array and Google voice. Read & try it →
A 2014 tablet in a printed clamshell, running an eight-tab dashboard that never scrolls: solar at five-second resolution, alarm, doorbells, lights, and a tile that knows whether its own charger is keeping up. With an exploded 3D model of the mount. Read & try it →
A Google-style calendar built into Home Assistant for the family: own logins with two-step sign-in, live sync, alerts, labels, where everyone has been, health from Withings and followed calendars like Stremio. Every security and privacy measure is listed. Read & try it →
A 2016 Echo Dot rooted and freed from Amazon, now a local Home Assistant voice satellite: wake words on the device, Whisper on the RTX 5070, Gemini for answers, and Luna's voice lighting up the wall panel in twenty-three live visuals, now open source. An Echo Show by the bed now draws seven of them itself. Read & try it →
The Victron solar and 32 kWh battery live on the wall panel with the real costs, a measured account of where the energy goes, and a planner that re-solves the next two days every fifteen minutes, with an AI checking its homework. It also runs a live trial of three tariffs on the house's own data. Read & see it →
Two Ring doorbells turned into a full local NVR — 24/7 recording, GPU-accelerated AI object detection, event rewind and phone alerts — with no Ring subscription. Frigate on an RTX 5070, streamed into the wall panel. Read & try it →
Eleven rooms that know whether anyone is actually in them — mmWave radar fused with PIR on ESPHome nodes, so lights and heating follow people, not just movement. Per-room zones, printed enclosures, all local. Read the design pack →
A native Meta Quest 3 mixed-reality app: look at the real room in passthrough, point at a Home Assistant device and pin it onto the fixture. The pins stay put across restarts and room changes, and you control the device from where it actually stands. Read & see it →
Two phones and the work van tracked through a self-hosted Traccar server on a keyless Esri dark map — addresses named to the actual house by a self-hosted property API, and a Day mode that draws the whole day's route and stops straight from Traccar. Read & try it →
Every UK forecourt's price from the government's open data, the van's real fuel level from its tracker, a low-fuel alert naming the best places to fill, and an honest weekly check of the fuel card against the pumps, updated by the supplier's own Friday text. Read & see it →
An open-source YouTube Music app for Android, remade as our own: a Tron look, Google Maps controls, widgets, casting and endless radio, plus a house version on the Pi that plays on the Echo Show and the other speakers by voice. Read & see it →
A crypto dashboard on the wall: six coins with live prices and change from 24 hours to all-time, a scrubable chart back to day one, and a news feed you can actually read on the panel — all from keyless public APIs and a tiny fetcher on the Pi. No data subscription. Read & try it →
A ceiling fan that has no hub and no connectable radio — it only listens for Bluetooth broadcast packets. We taught Home Assistant to shout the same packets from the Pi's own Bluetooth, landing speed, presets, reverse and a dimmable downlight, with no new hardware. Read how →
Bringing a cloud-free Rada Sense digital shower into Home Assistant — the sealed BLE and bus protocol pulled apart, what is controllable tonight, and the safe route to full control. Read the teardown →
Where it goes next — switchable dashboards, an LCARS bridge console, presence & geofencing, solar-aware automation and a tone-ACK ear that hears the alarm confirm. The ambitious wishlist. Explore →
How it actually got made. Kevin orchestrates — the vision, the wiring, the calls only a person can make; Claude Code drives — on the keyboard and over SSH into the Pi, reverse-engineering and debugging in the loop. The collaboration, the method, and the war stories. Read the journey →
A family calendar that stays at home: own logins and two-step sign-in, location strips and health, followed calendars, and a full list of the security and privacy built in. New page →
A YouTube Music player of our own: a Tron-styled Android app with Maps controls, widgets and casting, and a house version on the Pi that plays on the speakers by voice. New page →
A second-hand Echo Show freed with TECHO5: a dashboard it draws itself, the doorbell live when someone rings, seven voice visuals rewritten in Go, follow-up questions without the wake word, and a room that goes quiet while you talk. Echo Voice →
Every integration talks to the device on the LAN. Dead vendor clouds don't matter, and nothing depends on a subscription staying alive.
The alarm panel, remotes and sensors are untouched. Old kit — an alarm hub, a 2014 tablet — gets a second life instead of landfill.
Config is versioned to a private repo and every risky change is backed up first; secrets stay on the Pi. If it breaks, it comes back.
The same Raspberry Pi 4 — booting from a USB SSD — also carries a crypto paper-trading experiment and a solar grid-control flow, all comfortably under a 0.2 load.