The house
A small computer runs the house. Claude can read it, fix it, and notice when it breaks quietly.
18:00 · evening house check
One thing needs you.
The vacuum skipped its 9 a.m. clean. Its water tank is empty.
Spoken once on the fridge speaker. On a day with nothing wrong, it says nothing.
Sample with invented data. The real one looks the same.
What it does
- When I ask, Claude reads the live state of the house and does reversible things itself: lights, shades, climate, scenes, new automations.
- When something dies quietly (the vacuum skips its clean, a sensor goes offline), an evening check speaks up on the fridge speaker. On a healthy day it says nothing.
- When the laundry finishes, the household hears it, but never between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m.
- At 5 p.m. it writes a short "Today at Home" note onto the fridge screen.
How it works
1 · Hears
Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi 5 owns every device: lights, thermostats, vacuum, washer, fridge, cameras, shades.
2 · Thinks
Claude reaches it through about 95 tools, under a written policy: safe actions are pre-approved; locks, garage, alarm and anything irreversible need a yes.
3 · Does
Changes happen in the house; speech goes out through a voice that runs on the Pi itself, so the house can talk without the laptop.
What broke
Three months cut off, and nothing said so
After a network outage every cloud device stayed dead for about three months while the house looked fine. That is why the watchdog exists.
The watchdog that looked healthy
The vacuum failed its clean five days running and several devices were offline for ten, but the watchdog checked integrations, not devices. Now it checks a short list of things whose death breaks a routine.
"Your print is done", it wasn't
A 9-second Wi-Fi blip made the 3D printer replay "finished". Any "announce when X happens" rule now ignores reconnects.
By the numbers
- ~95
- house tools Claude can use
- 11
- rooms the vacuum knows
- 0
- times it unlocks a door on its own
The call that mattered
Silent unless something is wrong. A house that talks all the time gets muted.
Built with
Home Assistant on Raspberry Pi 5 · ha-mcp · Claude (headless jobs) · Local Whisper + Piper voice · Ollama on the laptop GPU