About OMEGA

I’m Neil Smith — senior principal engineer, cyber security engineer, and someone who thinks “just use the cloud” is rarely the right answer.

OMEGA started because I wanted a smart home that I actually controlled. Not one that stops working when Govee has an outage, or one that phones home to Amazon every time I turn a light on, or one that quietly disappears when a vendor decides to sunset their product line.

The name is a bit tongue-in-cheek. OMEGA — Omni-purpose Machine Entity for Generated Assistance — because if you’re going to build something, you may as well name it properly.

The philosophy

Local first. If it needs the internet to function, it’s a liability, not a feature. Every integration in OMEGA is either fully local or on the roadmap to become so.

Own your data. Cameras, presence detection, energy monitoring — none of it leaves the network. Ring was convenient. It was also sending footage to Amazon’s servers. That’s gone.

Engineer it properly. This isn’t a weekend project of dragging things into the Google Home app. Every decision has a reason. Every component was chosen deliberately. The blog exists to document why.

The stack

OMEGA runs on a NiPoGi P2 Mini PC — Ryzen 4300U, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD — with Proxmox as the hypervisor and Home Assistant OS running directly as a VM. Small, silent, efficient, and capable enough to run everything locally without breaking a sweat.

The first satellite — omega-office — is a Waveshare ESP32-S3 AI Smart Speaker, running ESPHome with on-device wake word detection. No audio ever leaves the device until you’ve said the wake word. That matters.

More devices are coming. More cloud dependencies are going.