Hacker Remix

Show HN: Merliot – plugging physical devices into LLMs

79 points by sfeldma 2 days ago | 23 comments

Merliot Hub is an AI-integrated device hub.

What does that mean? It means you can control and interact with your physical devices, your security cameras, your thermometer, seamlessly using natural language from an LLM host such as Claude Desktop or Cursor. The hub is a gateway between AI and the physical world.

What could go wrong?

alxjrvs 2 days ago

Feels like the kind of headline that would briefly pause in front of the camera to establish how the world got "like this".

hughw 2 days ago

Feels like a "what could possibly go wrong" thing.

spaceport 2 days ago

Ive been using the ollama nextcloud integration for a while and while rough at times it does work to control many devices. Lights and music. Very nontrivial to get it working consistantly however so maybe this could work. Not going to connect it to cloud claude however.

Also for the author in case they read this, the central/decentral hub architecture writing in privacy section is overly complex. Simplify it as "locally hosted, not cloud connected"

ravetcofx 2 days ago

do you have more info on this? I'm curious what nextcloud integration has to do with smart home stuff.

sfeldma 2 days ago

Thanks for the feedback; I'll revise the privacy section.

rybosome 2 days ago

I have far more ideas about this than time to execute it, but for a long time I’ve had this fantasy about a robot bandmate.

The idea is I’d go on stage singing and playing guitar with a looper and some samples, then bring a robot toy and introduce the robot “controlling” the looping and sampling as the bandmate.

It’s a gimmick that’s been done before, but with LLMs driving verbal interaction and now I could use this to animate a robot…it becomes pretty compelling. I’d plug the LLMs into the audio feed so I could banter with it and get responses then have the robot avatar animate accordingly.

If only my full time job saw value in this project.

yard2010 2 days ago

Imagine when you don't need money anymore because everything is automated to oblivion. Everything is affordable. So the kind of people like you won't have to work to make a living, you just do your art instead. Better for everyone!

dathos 2 days ago

I cannot understand this optimism, in my industry the profits of automation only flow upwards.

kevindamm 2 days ago

My understanding is that you need the optimists to mention it enough times before the world is ready, because it normalizes the concept in ways that not mentioning it ever (or mentioning it only cynically) wouldn't be able to.

brookst 2 days ago

While the profits of tech have also flowed upwards, even average to poor people have much improved quality of life from tech.

I’d prefer much less wealth inequality, but it’s not like the only benefit of automation is profit.

computerthings 2 days ago

[dead]

chrisdalke 2 days ago

Cool! As a moonshot fun idea I’ve been interested in MCP as a way to use informal conversations to task robots. I’ll have to play around with this!

One example on unmanned boats: a human could radio to the boat over VHF and say “move 100 meters south”… that speech-to-text would feed to an LLM which extracts the meaning and calls the MCP.

I’ll have to install this and play around.

sfeldma 2 days ago

Ya, sounds like a good idea to let the LLM do all the calculations and send simple instructions to boat. MCP tells it what data is available from the device.

I tried the MCP server with the demo (https://merliot.io/demo) using Cursor and asked:

What is the location of the "GPS nano" device?

The location of the "GPS nano" device is: Latitude: 30.448336 Longitude: -91.12896

speerer 2 days ago

This seems like a residential address. Irrespective of whether the creator deliberately exposed it, I would be a little bit cautious about sharing it further.

trillic 2 days ago

"There's a botter way"

https://www.marksetbot.com/

(not affiliated, just a fan)

darkwater 2 days ago

Isn't Home Assistant already doing this?

neonwatty 2 days ago

sure there's projects like https://github.com/acon96/home-llm but its early days for integration like this

A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 2 days ago

It is a weirdly exciting time to be alive.

neonwatty 2 days ago

cue the curb theme song

fitsumbelay 2 days ago

very neat.

gitroom 2 days ago

[dead]

Kevcmk 2 days ago

"What could go wrong?"

imhoguy 2 days ago

"Open the pod bay doors, HAL"...

gus_massa 2 days ago

Movie references are usually downvoted here, but since smart locks exists and the OP ask what could go wrong, it's a good question.

Is there a magic button to shut down the AI and go to 100% manual mode?

sfeldma 2 days ago

You don't need to enable the AI; it's optional. The web app has a full UI to manually work with your devices.

seebeen 2 days ago

[flagged]