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Show HN: Merliot – plugging physical devices into LLMs

github.com

81 pointssfeldma24 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?

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

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

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.

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!

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

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.

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.

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"

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

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

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.

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

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.

"There's a botter way"

https://www.marksetbot.com/

(not affiliated, just a fan)

automating some of the boilerplate when dealing with microcontrollers like the esp32 would be great.

also great - improving the ide interface: the last time i worked with esp32's using (micro) python the best solution i found was the Thonny ide - not the most productive setup.

Isn't Home Assistant already doing this?

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

It is a weirdly exciting time to be alive.

cue the curb theme song

very neat.

"What could go wrong?"

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

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?

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

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