Personal Project:Home Hub

Whathappenswhenatechiemovesintoanewplaceandprocrastinatesbybuildingasmarthomefromscratch

Started Feb 2026 — Active Build

🏠 Self-Hosted Stack🤖 Local AI (qwen3:8b)🔧 Building a Robot Now

nova · live

click the screen too →

your turn

Take the wheel

Drag to orbit. Click the TV screen to turn it on or off. Same controls as my actual Mac dashboard, without touching the real devices.

⌁ scroll to begin

Meet
Nova

personal project · 2026

My homemade
Alexa

eye displays

2× GC9A01

240×240 SPI

SCK · MOSI18 · 23 (shared)

CS L / R5 / 15

DC · RST2 · 4

RoboEyes: blink · gaze · mood

head MCU

ESP32-S3

drives all I/O

coreXtensa LX7 · 240 MHz

radiosWi-Fi 4 · BLE 5

I/OSPI · I²S · GPIO

one chip · three I/O subsystems

microphones

2× INMP441

I²S MEMS · stereo

SCK 33

WS 25

SD 32

temple stereo array · wake word + STT

speaker

MAX98357A

I²S amp · 3W

Piper TTS · “Jarvis” voice

scenarios

Nova can act proactively

no wake word needed · tap one to see it run

triggered by context · runs on its own

🦎

scenario · live

hi · meeting you for the first time

Nova learns who's on the Wi-Fi — one name at a time

1
a new device joins the network
Nova sees a fresh MAC address she's never seen before
2
she asks "who's this?"
Telegram ping + a ? animation on the chest
3
you reply with a name
free-text — e.g. "Andrei"
4
saved to local network history
MAC → name · stored on the Beelink · never leaves the box
5
hi animation plays on her chest
every future return triggers "welcome home" instead

⌁ this is how Nova builds memory — used by Welcome Home

⌁ proactive

things Nova does on her own

⌁ the brain

Nova runs qwen3:8b as her main LLM. To classify intents, orders, and tasks, we built a two-layer router — regex first, LLM fallback.

model

qwen3:8b

via Ollama

hostBeelink mini-PC

weights~4.7 GB · local

context32K tokens

⌁ live✗ no cloud✗ no api keys

routing

regex first · LLM fallback

▸ "what's the weather like?"

↓regex· 0.4msmatch

↓weather.current →

access

what nova reaches into

💡lights📺TV🤖vacuum🎵Spotify📹YouTube📅calendar🛒shopping list⏰timers💬Telegram📱WhatsApp🌐internet agent

+ growing

epilogue

That's Nova. She moved in two months ago and hasn't left.

What started as a weekend “sideload an LLM and wire it to Home Assistant” project turned into a full stack running on a single mini-PC under my desk. No cloud round-trips. No subscriptions. Everything she does happens between four walls.

18 intents, grouped four ways. The voice ones land on the wake word (or via Telegram if I'm not home). The proactive ones land on context — she figures out when to talk without being asked. Knowledge bounces through Perplexity. Environment bypasses the LLM entirely and just hits MQTT.

Voice

·set a timer
·play music
·turn lights on/off
·check the weather
·add to shopping list
·remind me later
·movie mode

Proactive

·morning briefing
·goodnight nudge
·welcome home
·first-time greet

Knowledge

·web search via Perplexity
·recipe lookup
·unit conversion
·calendar Q&A

Environment

·thermostat
·blinds
·speaker zones