The House That Shrugs When the Internet Dies — Your First Fully Local Smart-Home Hub

Every smart-home gadget in your house works beautifully — right up until someone else's server has a bad day. Your lights stop answering, your thermostat forgets you, and a plastic speaker on the shelf tells you it is having trouble connecting. Why should turning on a lamp in your own hallway require a round trip to a data centre in another state?

This project is the on-ramp to owning the alternative: one hub on hardware you can hold, one real device that answers to it, and a drill where you deliberately unplug your household's internet and watch the house keep working anyway. It is also where you learn the harder, more honest half — which parts of a "local" smart home are quietly not local at all, and how to find out for yourself instead of trusting a marketing page.