I’ve been thinking about what I actually want from home automation.
Not the version that gets marketed. Lights that turn on when you walk in, a thermostat you can control from your phone. That’s fine. It’s useful. However it’s just remote control with extra steps.
What I want is something closer to the house being aware. It should be proactive about its own state.
Let me tell you what I mean.
The problems I actually have
I want to see who’s outside.
My camera send me a notification at 1:00 AM that there’s movement outside my front door: is this someone I know? A stray cat? Someone trying to break in? I want the house to already know. Is it a person? Is it a face it’s seen before? Are they wearing a uniform or have a delivery bag? Sure, there are cloud services that offer this but the subscription model is outrageous and not as customizable as I would like. I want it to learn people. That 1:00 AM visitor is my kiddo coming back from a late night snack run.
Has the trash been taken out?
Every week, the same question. So I trek downstairs, brave the weather and check for myself. I want a system that knows whether the bins actually went out and take action if not.
I leave and the house is in some unknown state.
Is the garage closed? Are the doors locked? Did I leave lights on? I do a mental checklist every time I leave and I still miss things. At the end of the night I want to know: house is secure. Not “probably secure.” Actually verified.
Appliances finish and nobody knows.
The dishwasher is done. The dryer is done. Too many times have I had to rerun the laundry because it sat in the wash too long after being done and started to smell that damp funky smell. A notification that says “washer cycle complete” would fix this immediately.
I pull up to my driveway and nothing happens.
The garage doesn’t know I’m home. I have to reach all the way up to my visor to press the remote. This no way to live!
What I want the system to actually do
Not just respond to commands. Anticipate situations.
Morning: blinds open gradually, coffee maker starts, the thermostat adjusts, and I get a briefing. Not a weather widget, a briefing. Here’s what’s on your calendar. Here’s what your AI assistant Klaus flagged overnight. Here’s what needs your attention today.
Away: the house looks occupied without being occupied. Lights on timers that don’t look like timers. Motion-based patterns, not schedules.
Night: one check. Everything locked, garage down, lights off. Confirmation, not a checklist to work through manually.
Why this is actually hard
The individual pieces are mostly available. Smart plugs, motion sensors, door locks, cameras. All of this hardware exists and isn’t expensive.
The hard part is the integration layer. Getting all these devices to talk to each other, to a central system, to Klaus, and having the logic be smart enough to be useful without being annoying.
Home Assistant¹ is the platform I’m building on. It’s local, open, and connects to nearly everything. The plan is to run it on my always-on desktop via Hyper-V² (Microsoft’s built-in virtualization platform), connect it to Klaus, and start wiring things together.
The visitor detection piece is harder. That needs a camera with good enough positioning, a face recognition pipeline, and a notification system that doesn’t cry wolf. That one’s a project, not a weekend.
The through-line
The reason I’m excited about this isn’t really the individual features. It’s that the same approach that made Klaus useful for my digital life should work for my physical home.
Clear awareness of state. Proactive action on that state. Notify me when something needs a human decision, handle everything else automatically.
I went on a cruise and my AI team ran itself for seven days. I want my house to do the same thing while I’m in it.
More posts to come as I build this out.
References
- Home Assistant — open source home automation platform
- Hyper-V — Microsoft’s built-in virtualization platform for Windows