厝內 (Chu Lai) · Homebody: one app for every device at home

My aircons are Daikin and my air purifier is PRISM+, and each brand wants me to use its own app, with its own account and its own idea of what a “room” is. Chu Lai · Homebody is a smart home app I’m building for my own home. It brings everything together in one place, organised the way I actually think about my home: room by room.

🏠 Why “Chu Lai”?Chu Lai (厝內) is Hokkien for “inside the house.” The app is built around the home, not around the brands in it.

💡 The ideas behind it

Rooms, not brands. I open Jw’s room and see its aircon and purifier side by side. I don’t need to remember which app each one belongs to.
Many brands, one system. I’m building my own smart home system that brings the different brands in my home together, so I can control them all from one place instead of switching between apps.
Local first, cloud only as a fallback. Where a device can be reached on the home Wi-Fi, Chu Lai talks to it directly, with no cloud and no account. For Daikin, that meant reverse-engineering the Wi-Fi adapter’s local protocol. Where that isn’t possible, as with the PRISM+ purifier, it goes through the brand’s cloud instead.
It should feel like home. The design is inspired by a 70s–90s Singapore flat: a wall switch for power, piano-key buttons for fan speed and a chop stamp when a change goes through. It has a day theme and a night theme.

🔌 What it controls today

Daikin aircons: power, temperature, mode, fan and swing
PRISM+ air purifier: air quality, filter life, timers, routines and Night mode

🔭 What’s next

The ceiling fans
The toilet light that always gets left on
AI Voice control
A Raspberry Pi as the brain of the system, always on at home, so the house keeps running even when my computer is off

🛠️ Built with React and Tauri (Rust).

📖 Build log

I’ll be posting my progress as Journal entries under this project. If you want to know more or see what’s new, check back here. I’ll add each new entry to the list below as it goes up.

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