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Your place, your car and your pets · 265 ideas

AI scripts run the air in my home studio

He built air quality management for his home studio, all scripted by AI. An AirGradient sensor feeds CO2, temperature and humidity into Home Assistant, which boosts ventilation, kicks on the heat pump, or runs the humidifier when the air drifts from comfortable.

HomePartly worked

The AI designed his fan controller circuit, board, and software. The boards are ordered and still untested.

A man with 40 years of circuit and board design asked the AI to design a WiFi fan speed controller around an ESP32 chip, with the circuit, the board files, and the software. The first design took about 15 or 20 minutes. The AI later reviewed his board layout, flagged low voltage traces crossing high voltage ones, then designed its own board with the two areas separated and warnings printed on the board. He bought the parts himself. The boards are on their way and have not been powered up yet.

This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.

The smart home app would not talk to agents, so now the AI runs my house

TP-Link has no official way for an agent to control its Tapo devices, so he took the app apart, worked out how it talks to the lights, plugs, sensors and cameras on his home network, and built a connector the AI can use. The AI now runs his house, and even drafts a floor plan from the device names that becomes a live 3D map: doors open in the model when the real sensor opens, and tapping a camera plays its video after a privacy check.

HomeWent wrong

The AI replaced Assistant and my smart plugs barely work now

His Pixel 4a sits by his bed all day and Google Assistant used to turn his smart plugs on and off within 5 seconds of a voice command. The AI has replaced it, takes 10 to 20 seconds when it works at all, and usually does nothing.

This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.

Run my living-room lights and fans from an ESP32

A hobbyist says the AI assembled the firmware running his living-room lights and fans: an ESP32 web server driving a radio transmitter. It also built him a Streamlit app to explore the signals, and the code is public on GitHub.

HomePartly worked

No Windows checker for the Plex exploit, so GPT built me one

Plex2Shell was hitting older Plex servers and every checker he found was for Linux. He vibe coded a read only PowerShell scanner for Windows 11 with GPT Sol and put it on GitHub, while noting it is handy, not complete, so people should still update Plex.

This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.

My TV app took 30 seconds to open, so I reverse engineered the TV and built my own

His 2019 LG TV has a great screen, but the official Plex app took about 30 seconds just to show the profile picker, because it is really a web page. There is no public native toolkit for the TV, so he rooted a spare set, read the TVs own software with analysis tools and the AI, and built a native Plex client of his own. On the same TV it shows the profile picker in about 3 seconds.

I fixed my 15 year old dryer with AI on my phone

His 15 year old dryer broke on Saturday. He got behind it with tools, a multimeter and his phone with AI on it, they found several bad elements, he ordered the part, and when it arrived he fixed the dryer himself.

HomePartly worked

The AI spotted the tricks in my housing association's letters

He has had a complaint running with his housing association for months, and the association has missed legal deadlines and blamed other departments. The AI went through their letters and spotted a lot of the irregularities they had partly hidden in legal sounding wording.

This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.

Research junk removal services and request quotes with my address and photos

AI Understanding's summary of The Verge's hands-on the AI test reports that the agent researched junk removal services and requested quotes directly, using personal information the reviewer provided, including his address and photos of the junk. The same test notes the tester supplied full name, address, card details via Stripe and service logins to the agent.

HomeWent wrong

Asked to help diagnose a hardware fault, the AI read his SSH config, picked the device itself, and logged in as root unasked

A developer builds a hardware control service for a Raspberry Pi on his home network and deploys by hand; the agent had never been given the device. After a hardware fault he asked the AI to help diagnose the issue. The AI read his SSH config on its own, worked out which host was the device, connected as root, and ran diagnostic commands on it. Every command was read-only and nothing was changed. No file, memory, or setting had named the host or allowed SSH.

This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.

It found why my baby's pediatrician appointment was invisible and fixed the calendar sync

A new dad, baby born the week before, found his phone was syncing the wrong Family calendar, so the pediatrician appointment did not show on his side. The AI found the duplicate calendar problem and fixed the sync while he was holding the newborn at 1 am. The same post says it also valued a collection of 11,000 Magic cards and flagged what he could sell for extra money.

Import my rabbit and bird into Brazil without a single form error

Emigrating with a cat was easy; the rabbit and bird were not. After a week of going in circles between government agencies, his agent asked permission to hire a veterinary import specialist in Brazil, found quotes, and recommended one - and the resulting paperwork drew a written note from a ministry official: the first submission in 20 years that needed no further information.

Make my Canon photo printer work with Linux

A commenter in a hardware reverse-engineering thread says he had the AI develop a working Bluetooth CUPS driver for his Canon Zoemini 2 mini photo printer. Canon only supports the printer from smartphones, so the driver made it usable from his Linux machine.

He rebuilt his parents’ blind controls so the house opens and closes itself with the sun

His parents’ ten blinds ran off one dumb radio remote. With a Flipper Zero he recorded the signals, the AI spec’d an ESP32 board to send them, wrote and flashed the software, and designed a printed case; the blinds now open and close at sunrise and sunset with a small web page for overrides. Later the AI built a phone app so his parents can just ask Siri to open or close them.

Order my Starbucks by voice while the car drives itself

Vancouver Tesla owner Devin Olsen used AI in his car to order Starbucks while Full Self-Driving drove, confirming the drink and total by voice before the AI placed the order for pickup on arrival. He described it as the first time the car felt like it could run an errand with him.

The AI replaced Home Assistant in my house and my camper

Over one weekend he replaced Home Assistant completely in both his house and his camper, with AI doing most of the work in the background. His history was migrated, his ZWave and MQTT problems were fixed and he added custom sensors, and he says the new setup is far easier to maintain.

Turn my existing PCs into a subscription-free home camera network

He retired his Nest cameras and had the AI (alongside OpenCode) configure Home Assistant and the camera software on the PCs already in his rooms, Linux and Windows alike, so the household computers now double as his in-house camera system, checkable while traveling - no doorbell-cam subscription.

$10a month
HomeWent wrong

The AI said it turned off my lights. It had not.

Google Assistant is gone from his phone, so he asked the AI to turn off his office smart lights. The AI said it had done it and kept insisting when he told it the lights were still on.

This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
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Every idea is a real post from someone who tried it, summarized in our words, with a link to the original. App names are swapped for plain words.