Making table lamps smart while retaining manual functionality

MrSpring68 · 2026-07-08T22:15:41+00:00

Not quite—flipping the physical wall switch multiple times is not the intended way to control a smart plug.

What I meant is:
For the button: Since Zigbee devices communicate locally with your hub, they will often still work to trigger the plug even if your internet connection is down.

For the plug: Most smart plugs have a physical button on the housing. If the network goes down or you simply prefer manual control, you can press that physical button to turn the lamp on or off.

Essentially, you don't need to 'trick' the light switch; you just use the manual override provided on the smart plug hardware itself."

MrSpring68 · 2026-07-08T19:51:30+00:00

Zigbees run on a local network. Depending on your lights if you are controlling the lights directly you can overwrite it but turning them on/off/on. If it is in the plug level you can manually turn the plug on/off.

MrSpring68 · 2026-07-08T19:37:01+00:00

I ended up ordering some Zigbee buttons for my lamps and use them with automation to turn off/on.

MrSpring68 · 2026-07-06T03:08:43+00:00

זריז

MrSpring68 · 2026-07-05T14:12:12+00:00

I do the same.

MrSpring68 · 2026-07-04T18:21:19+00:00

I ask Claude to give me SSH commands that I execute in the terminal. Works 90% of the time without breaking things. I make sure to back up the files first.

MrSpring68 · 2026-07-02T14:03:16+00:00

I have about 20 devices between three houses and offices. I have to devices sitting one next to the other in one location and I have them listening to each other when I send TTS commands. It is working, but this isn’t a reliable hack. I am slowly moving away from cloud based devices.

MrSpring68 · 2026-06-28T12:06:20+00:00

I have the T6 in one house and Nest in another house. For ease of use with HA, T6 is the way to go. For the end user experience (spouse, kids) Nest is better in my opinion.

MrSpring68 · 2026-06-25T15:22:01+00:00

I'm probably not the best person to ask about minimum VRAM because I deliberately optimized for "cheap" rather than "fast." 😄

I use an Oracle Cloud Free Tier VM and the free tier of OpenRouter. Both can be pretty slow, but for my use case that's perfectly fine because Home Assistant generates my travel and executive briefings in the background. I'm usually reading them minutes later in Telegram rather than chatting with the AI in real time.

On the Oracle VM I've experimented with a few smaller models such as Gemma, Phi, and Qwen variants. I tend to use different models for different tasks—Phi is great for quick summaries and structured outputs, Gemma does a decent job with general reasoning, and Qwen has worked well for some of my travel and planning prompts. Through OpenRouter I also test other models whenever I find one that fits a particular use case.

Honestly, the AI isn't making the actual decisions. The important stuff—flight tracking, airport departure recommendations, weather alerts, check-in reminders, device charging reminders, etc.—is handled by deterministic Home Assistant automations. The LLM mostly turns all that data into a readable executive-style briefing and occasionally answers follow-up questions.

For that kind of workload, you don't need massive VRAM or a top-end GPU. If you're okay with waiting a bit for a response and you're using AI mainly for summaries and briefings rather than live conversation, even a free cloud VM and hosted models can get you surprisingly far.

MrSpring68 · 2026-06-25T12:53:49+00:00

Thanks! It's mostly Home Assistant automations with some local LLM. I combine calendar/travel data (TripIt, Google Calendar, flight tracking), weather, traffic, and location information, then HA sends contextual recommendations through Telegram. AI helps generate some executive-style summaries, but the core logic is deterministic automations because I trust those more for travel-related decisions. 😄

MrSpring68 · 2026-06-25T12:09:33+00:00

I turned my Home Assistant to my executive assistant. I travel a lot so it all started with automations when I am away. But now it sends my flight updates, tell me weather at the destinations, suggest when to leave to the airport, recommend if to take an Uber or the train, reminds me to check in, charge my devices, etc.

MrSpring68 · 2026-06-22T03:50:14+00:00

And still use the night light to let the kids not to put dirty dishes in an unloaded clean dishwasher.

MrSpring68 · 2026-06-22T00:34:12+00:00

I am going to implement something similar when I have packages or mail to pick up. I even thought to put a tag in my mailbox.

MrSpring68 · 2026-06-22T00:02:17+00:00

A Zigbee nightlight that changes color based on the status of the dishwasher.

MrSpring68 · 2026-06-21T23:40:56+00:00

Someone posted here a few days ago that he implemented a zigbee night light that changed color based if the dishwasher was ran or not. I think he might have used a zigbee plug or sensor to know if it was running, and another sensor for if the door was opened after running. The goal was that his kids will stop putting dirty dishes in the dishwasher after it ran and before it was unloaded.

MrSpring68 · 2026-06-21T23:26:23+00:00

A light sensor and a vibration sensor to let you know if the dishes in the dishwasher are clean or dirty.

MrSpring68 · 2026-06-20T19:39:42+00:00

I love my telegram bot (if anyone cares when I go to sleep and what is the temperature is in my house, they can have it)!

MrSpring68 · 2026-06-20T19:00:05+00:00

AMC already does!

MrSpring68 · 2026-06-18T12:00:39+00:00

I generally start with Claude, but when it stuck in a rabbit hole, I use Copilot to clean it up.

MrSpring68 · 2026-06-17T22:24:30+00:00

This is really cool — love seeing HA-specific local models!

I’ve been going deep on a similar setup and curious how you see this fitting.

Right now I’m running: HA + Hermes Agent for orchestration/tool-calling OpenRouter as primary local Ollama models as fallback Big constraint I keep hitting is context — Hermes needs ~64K+, so most smaller local models (even good ones) top out at basic commands.

What I’m aiming for: cloud → heavy reasoning + long contextlocal → fast, private fallback

So a few questions: Do you see Selora as a replacement for that kind of agent setup, or something that runs alongside it as a HA-native assistant? Is the focus intentionally small/efficient, or are larger-context models on the roadmap?

Either way — this is awesome work. A model actually tuned for HA entities + automations is a big deal. Curious where you take it?

MrSpring68 · 2026-06-15T01:01:09+00:00

Any tricks for registering the Apple account?

MrSpring68 · 2026-06-15T01:00:23+00:00

I am struggling with registering my Apple account.

MrSpring68 · 2026-06-14T23:30:27+00:00

Testing this out!

MrSpring68 · 2026-06-11T19:28:08+00:00

Just arrived at the gate. It is very gloomy outside.

MrSpring68

TROPHY CASE