Will it work with my things?

Three shelves. Local forever means no account, no cloud, no vendor permission — if the maker disappeared tomorrow, it keeps working. Cloud footnote means a real, working integration that leans on the vendor's goodwill — fine to use, never the house's spine. Know before you buy means there's a better path, and we'll show you it.

Here's a delightful accident of Apple's rules: to earn the Works with Apple HomeKit badge, an accessory must be controllable directly over your home network — no vendor cloud in the loop. That makes the badge, in effect, a guaranteed-local-API certification. Our box can act as the controller and adopt any HomeKit accessory directly, fully locally, with no Apple account and no vendor account at all — even from brands that offer nothing else local. If you already own HomeKit gear, you're sitting on some of the best-behaved devices a private smart home can have.

Three things to know before adopting. An accessory pairs with only one controller, so moving it to our box removes it from Apple Home — but the box can then present everything it manages back to the family's iPhones as one tidy HomeKit home, which most households experience as an upgrade: Siri and the Home app keep working, now with every device in the house included, not just the badge-wearing ones. You'll need each accessory's pairing code (printed on the device or its box — worth gathering before an install visit). And cameras are the exception: HomeKit Secure Video stays inside Apple's world and doesn't translate.

Xiaomi is everywhere in Thai homes — vacuums, air purifiers, fans, sensors, cameras — so it deserves a careful answer rather than a traffic-light sticker. The good news: since late 2024 Xiaomi maintains an official Home Assistant integration — one of very few big vendors to do so, and a genuine statement of intent. The nuance: it signs in through your Xiaomi account and works cloud-first, with a partial local-control mode for Wi-Fi devices on the same network; Bluetooth and infrared devices stay cloud-side through it. In practice we treat Xiaomi as three different brands wearing one logo:

Verdict: a Xiaomi household is a good starting point for one of our boxes — most of it integrates well, some of it integrates perfectly — and we'll always tell you which of your devices sit on which side of that line.

SwitchBot's whole catalogue is built around one idea we love: make the existing home smart — motorise the curtains you already own, press the buttons you already have, read the rooms you already live in. They're now an official Works with Home Assistant partner, and the connection story is unusually good.

The Bluetooth devices are first class — no hub needed at all. Curtain motors, blind tilters, button-pressing Bots, locks and the temperature/humidity Meters all pair directly with our box over Bluetooth, fully locally, with no SwitchBot account in the loop. Our own living-room curtains run exactly this way: two solar-topped Curtain 3 motors that open on a morning schedule, close for movie night, and answer to a spoken word in three languages — without ever talking to a cloud. The box's radio ears extend through the house, so range is a solved problem.

Prefer Matter? SwitchBot's hubs act as a Matter bridge, and some newer devices speak Matter directly over Wi-Fi — still local, still instant. The one shelf to know about: infrared remote-blasting and their robot vacuums go through the hub's cloud service, which we install gladly with the caveat said out loud, same as any cloud device.

The most-asked question, and one where 2026 has a genuinely clear answer with two good paths.

Path one — Roborock, no surgery. The official integration logs into Roborock's cloud once, then does day-to-day control locally: room-by-room cleaning, live maps, sensors, all still working when their cloud has a bad day. Stick to the S, Qrevo and Saros lines; warranty intact, fancy self-emptying docks included.

Path two — Dreame with Valetudo, for the purist. Valetudo replaces the vacuum's cloud firmware with a local web interface: full maps and room cleaning with zero cloud, zero account, forever — the robot that matches our ethos exactly. The trade: buy from the supported-models list (not the newest flagship — rootability lags about a year behind releases), and accept the warranty argument.

Why it matters here: Home Assistant maps vacuum room segments onto the same "areas" our voice assistant thinks in — so "vacuum the kitchen", spoken in Thai, Chinese or English, cleans the actual kitchen. Multi-floor homes work best as one robot per floor; robots famously can't climb stairs.

Cameras are where the local-first idea earns its keep most visibly, and here we have a clear recommendation: Ubiquiti's UniFi Protect. It is the way to do security without a cloud — cameras, video doorbells and door/motion sensors recording to a network video recorder you own, with no subscription, and a first-rate Home Assistant integration that runs entirely on the local network. The doorbell's ring and Protect's smart detections — person, vehicle, animal, even package, and on its AI cameras the faces of the people you have named — arrive as instant events the house acts on, so "someone's at the door" becomes a name spoken through the living-room speaker, and the kitchen camera can record only when the house is empty. Their UniFi Access door readers connect the same local way, and the same company's network gear integrates just as cleanly, down to presence detection from which phones are on the Wi-Fi. Two things said out loud before you buy in: Protect cameras work only with a UniFi console or NVR — it's an ecosystem, priced like one — and the console's initial setup wants a Ubiquiti account even though day-to-day operation stays on your LAN. For a household that wants security done properly, it is the strongest local-first platform on the market, and it is what we install.

On a smaller budget, Reolink cameras hand the house proper local streams and a solid Home Assistant integration — motion and person events the automations can use, recordings that never leave the building — without the recognition layer. A good place to start; Protect is where the naming and the doorbell live.

The cloud camera brands can't offer that trade. Ring keeps recordings behind a subscription with no local path; Eufy and Wyze publish no official APIs, leaving only community bridges. None of the big camera clouds will tell your house who is at the door — for the full approach, see the camera awareness section on our product pages and the privacy-first automations on the automations tour.

The single most popular thing new smart-home owners add in their first year, and the one with a payback you can point at on a bill. Three layers, all of which our boxes speak fluently:

A solar roof without monitoring is a story your installer told you; a solar roof with monitoring is a live instrument the whole family watches. Most inverters sold in Thailand integrate well — the path just differs by brand.

The newest room of the smart home is the driveway, and Thailand's EV boom makes it a first-class citizen here.

Spend an evening on the Home Assistant community and the range of what real households automate is glorious — and nearly all of it works with our boxes today. A sampler from the front page: leak sensors under sinks that shut the water valve before the floor knows; a contact sensor on the medicine cabinet that gently answers "did I take my pills today?"; plant moisture sensors running a "garden mission control"; personal weather stations feeding hyper-local forecasts; 3D printers reporting progress to the wall tablet; e-ink displays that show the day's schedule and use no power doing it; NFC tags that make any surface a button; dehumidifiers and fans made smart with a plug and a humidity sensor; pool pumps on solar-aware timers.

If a thing in your life has a state worth knowing or a switch worth pressing, there is almost certainly a path — and finding the right path for your particular things is precisely the survey we do before any install.

Every verdict above comes from the same place: does it still work when the vendor changes its mind? Local-first devices pass forever. Cloud devices pass until a pricing meeting somewhere decides otherwise — as garage doors, and now Samsung appliances, have learned. We'll always install what you own and love; we'll also always tell you which shelf it sits on — before you buy, not after.