Smart environments

Home automation that stays under your control: vendor-neutral, privacy-minded, usually Home Assistant on dedicated on-prem hardware.

For

Homeowners and small properties who want the house to work harder without handing everything to one consumer cloud.

The usual mess

Devices that do not talk to each other. Brittle DIY. Cameras and cloud accounts added without a clear architecture.

What we do

Home Assistant on dedicated on-prem hardware (containerised, Postgres-backed). Cloud only where a device forces it.

Mixed-brand Zigbee (ZHA) on open coordinators: lights, switches, sensors, shutters, water valves. Not a single-vendor hub.

Custom integration work when the shelf option is wrong (ZHA quirks, ESPHome, upstream contributions).

Presence and occupancy that drive lighting and privacy automations.

Everyday control kept deliberate: limited voice exposure, household dashboards, runbooks for ongoing operation.

NucBox (on-prem host)

The hardened mini-PC class of host we use for installations we build and operate. We do not sell this hardware and we have no OEM partnership.

Encrypted disk with TPM unlock

Tailscale-only administration

No inbound ports from the public internet

Encrypted nightly backups mirrored off-site

Containerised Home Assistant and Postgres

Security

Local-first by default; every kept cloud dependency written down.

Cameras via Frigate, with presence-aware privacy controls and network limits so footage stays local.

Home network basics done properly: DNS, TLS on the LAN, mesh Wi-Fi, Tailscale for remote access, ISP/Starlink monitoring, off-site backups.

Same host hardening as on the NucBox card.

We are not a certified alarm, medical, or life-safety installer.

Public engineering

Hands-on Home Assistant, Zigbee, and ESPHome work since 2024.

First conversation

Bring the property type, what you already run, privacy priorities, and the one problem you most want solved. We map what must stay local, sketch a staged scope if it looks like a fit, and say so when DIY or another specialist is the better next step.

If we continue under a separate agreement, typical outputs are architecture notes, an integration plan, a configured system in agreed scope, and an owner runbook.

Subject: Smart environment: discovery