Small local tools for energy, climate data and local AI, built to keep the useful facts close to home.
A Sonos compatibility problem somehow became root access to a Vodafone Ultra Hub, firmware-bank archaeology, custom Wi-Fi control and the beginnings of a Home Assistant network dashboard.
Why avoiding one more vendor app turned into a small LAN of Things: local protocols, MQTT, narrow-purpose bridges and Home Assistant as the useful front end.
Three Varilight V-Pro Smart dimmers, a small Proxmox box and a dislike of unnecessary software turned into protocol analysis, a local controller, MQTT, Home Assistant discovery and a surprisingly complete management UI.
A self-hosted Octopus Energy dashboard that preserves meter readings, tariff evidence and supplier allocations instead of guessing what energy should have cost.
A five-minute collector and simple dashboard for investigating room trends without cramming everything into Home Assistant.
A local LLM born from a simple cost-saving idea: keep repetitive evidence work local, save Minion/Codex for jobs that actually need it, and see how far a tiny mini-PC can be pushed.
