It’s possible to connect Home Assistant to AI services such as Claude. Depending on the connector you use, your AI chatbot can not only read information about your smart home but also write automations, build dashboards, turn things on and off, and more. I’d seen plenty of people rave about it, so I decided to see what all the fuss was about.
Home Assistant has its own Model Context Protocol server
Home Assistant has its own native Model Context Protocol server (MCP) that you can use to connect an AI chatbot to your smart home. However, Home Assistant’s MCP server is quite limited in scope; it exposes Home Assistant through the Assist API, allowing AI clients to access information about exposed entities and control them, but it doesn’t provide direct access to Home Assistant’s configuration, automations, dashboards, or entity registry.
However, there are also some community MCP servers that let you do a lot more. I installed the Unofficial and Awesome Home Assistant MCP Server, which is a terrible name, so I will henceforth call it HA-MCP, as that’s what it’s called in the GitHub URL. HA-MCP allows you to both read and modify many parts of Home Assistant, making it both more powerful and potentially riskier to use.
Granting an AI chatbot access to your Home Assistant server is not risk-free. You may expose sensitive information, or the AI may mistakenly take actions that can damage your setup and potentially cause data loss. You should use it at your own risk.
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4.41″L x 4.41″W x 1.26″H
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12 Ounces
Home Assistant Green is a pre-built hub directly from the Home Assistant team. It’s a plug-and-play solution that comes with everything you need to set up Home Assistant in your home without needing to install the software yourself.
The first things I got Claude to do
Issues were quickly identified
I’d put off trying HA-MCP because giving a third-party AI chatbot access to my Home Assistant server didn’t sit well. Privacy is a core focus of Home Assistant and exposing a huge amount of information about my smart home to an AI company is far from private. However, since I was planning to rebuild Home Assistant from scratch, I figured I would give it a try as it didn’t really matter if Claude decided to delete everything.
Setting up the MCP server is fairly simple to do, and the first thing I did was ask Claude to take a look at my system and see if it could identify any issues. It quickly scanned through more than 1,700 entities and 118 integrations and identified some significant problems, including the fact that my automatic backups hadn’t been running for a couple of weeks because I was close to the storage limit of my Home Assistant VM in Proxmox.
This was something I’d completely missed and could easily have led to me losing anything that I’d created in the past couple of weeks, so I was already impressed. After fixing this and a few other issues Claude had found, I got Claude to find any unused entities, integrations, and automations that I no longer needed, and it was able to remove them all once granted permission.
QuizQuirky and creative homelab projects
Trivia challenge
From Pi-holes to Proxmox clusters — how well do you know the wild world of homelab tinkering?
NetworkingHardwareSoftwareDIYSelf-Hosting
What is the primary purpose of running Pi-hole in a homelab?
Correct! Pi-hole acts as a DNS sinkhole, intercepting requests to known ad-serving and tracking domains before they ever reach your devices. It runs beautifully on a Raspberry Pi and can block ads for every device on your network without installing anything on individual gadgets.
Not quite — Pi-hole is a DNS-based ad blocker that works at the network level. Instead of filtering ads on each device separately, it intercepts DNS queries for known ad domains and returns nothing, effectively blocking them for your entire home network.
Which hypervisor platform is most popular among homelab enthusiasts for running multiple virtual machines on a single server?
Correct! Proxmox VE (Virtual Environment) is a free, open-source hypervisor based on Debian Linux that supports both KVM virtual machines and LXC containers. Its powerful web UI and active community have made it the go-to choice for homelab builders who want enterprise-grade features without the enterprise price tag.
The most popular choice is actually Proxmox VE, a free and open-source hypervisor built on Debian. Unlike VirtualBox or VMware Fusion, which are primarily desktop tools, Proxmox is designed to run headless on a server and manage dozens of VMs and containers through a sleek web interface.
What kind of software is Nextcloud, commonly self-hosted in homelabs?
Correct! Nextcloud is a self-hosted alternative to services like Google Drive or Dropbox, letting you store files, sync calendars, share photos, and even video chat — all on your own hardware. It’s one of the most popular self-hosted apps in the homelab community because it replaces so many paid cloud services at once.
Nextcloud is actually a personal cloud storage and collaboration platform — think of it as your own private Google Drive. Homelab enthusiasts love it because it lets them take back control of their data, syncing files, contacts, and calendars across devices without relying on a third-party cloud service.
What is a common homelab use for old enterprise switches picked up cheaply from eBay, such as a Cisco Catalyst?
Correct! Old enterprise switches like Cisco Catalysts are homelab gold — they support VLANs, link aggregation, and quality-of-service features that consumer switches lack entirely. Homelabbers use VLANs to logically separate IoT devices, guest networks, and trusted machines, adding a meaningful layer of security to their home setups.
The right answer is using them as VLAN-capable managed switches. Cheap enterprise switches from eBay are a homelab staple because they bring real network segmentation features home. With VLANs, you can isolate your sketchy smart fridge from your personal computers — a genuinely useful security practice.
What does the homelab tool Grafana primarily do?
Correct! Grafana is an open-source analytics and visualization platform that turns raw metrics into beautiful, interactive dashboards. Paired with data sources like Prometheus or InfluxDB, it’s commonly used in homelabs to display everything from CPU temperatures and network throughput to power consumption and disk I/O in real time.
Grafana is actually a data visualization tool that creates dashboards from metrics. In homelabs, it’s typically paired with Prometheus or InfluxDB to display system stats, network graphs, and sensor data in real time. Once you see your server’s CPU load as a glowing graph on a big monitor, there’s no going back.
What is a ‘NAS’ in the context of a homelab, and which brand is most commonly associated with beginner-friendly NAS devices?
Correct! NAS stands for Network-Attached Storage, and Synology is widely considered the most beginner-friendly brand in the space. Their DiskStation lineup runs a polished Linux-based OS called DSM, which makes it easy to set up file sharing, media streaming, and automated backups without touching a command line.
NAS stands for Network-Attached Storage, and Synology is the brand most associated with easy-to-use consumer and prosumer NAS devices. Their DSM operating system gives even newcomers a clean interface for managing drives, running apps, and backing up data — making it a classic first homelab purchase.
Which open-source project allows homelab users to self-host a full media server that can stream movies and TV shows to almost any device?
Correct! Plex Media Server is one of the most beloved homelab applications, letting you organize your personal media collection and stream it to phones, smart TVs, game consoles, and browsers. While Jellyfin is a fully free and open-source alternative, Plex pioneered the category and remains hugely popular thanks to its polished apps and remote access features.
The answer is Plex Media Server, which lets you host your own Netflix-style streaming service from your homelab. Jackett, Sonarr, and Bazarr are companion tools used to find and organize media, but Plex (or its open-source sibling, Jellyfin) is the actual server that streams it to all your devices.
What quirky homelab project involves setting up a miniature version of the internet’s routing infrastructure at home, often using software like BIRD or FRRouting?
Correct! Some dedicated homelabbers go deep enough to simulate BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) — the same routing protocol that underpins the entire internet — using software routers and tools like BIRD or FRRouting. Some enthusiasts even obtain their own ASN (Autonomous System Number) and a block of real IPv6 addresses to participate in the actual global routing table.
The answer is building a home BGP lab. BGP is the protocol that makes the real internet work by telling routers how to reach every network on earth. Hardcore homelabbers recreate this at home using virtual routers, and some even get their own ASN and IPv6 block to peer with real internet exchanges — a truly wild rabbit hole.
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Claude was clearly useful for these types of admin tasks, but what I really wanted to try out was using Claude to create something new. It was time to let AI build an automation.
I let Claude control my computer—and it filled my Amazon basket
AI does the boring stuff, just not very fast.
Where using Claude really shines
You can create automations with natural language
Using Claude to create automations is honestly a dream. You just tell Claude what you want the automation to do, and it finds the relevant entities and builds the entire automation for you. If you’re trying to create something complex, it’s so much easier than trying to do it yourself. All of the automations that Claude built for me worked as expected, and I couldn’t see any obvious issues in the YAML.
I also tried building a dashboard. I wanted to create a weather dashboard that used the same classic weather icons that I remember from weather reports growing up. I told Claude what I wanted and uploaded an image of an old weather report, and Claude got to work.
It took a few iterations to get things how I wanted them, but in just a few minutes I had a dashboard that looked far better than I could have built myself. Using Claude really does make creating things in Home Assistant far more accessible.
It wasn’t all smooth sailing
AI can and will get things wrong
That’s not to say that using the HA-MCP was perfect. I hit several frustrations and ended up having to fix some parts myself.
I wanted to create a dashboard to display all the fixtures and live scores for the 2026 soccer World Cup. Claude created a new dashboard and installed the TeamTracker integration and dashboard card. It also gave me the YAML to paste into my configuration file to create the sensors for each team in the World Cup.
This is where things started to go wrong. Claude started to include countries that aren’t even in the 2026 World Cup, and many of the country abbreviations it used were wrong, so the cards wouldn’t load. When I pointed this out, Claude tried to fix things but ended up making it worse, changing the sensors so that some of the sensors that had been working were also now broken.
After a lot of back and forth that ate up much of my Claude usage, I gave up and fixed the problems myself.
What HA-MCP can’t do
While HA-MCP is powerful, there were still some things it couldn’t do in my setup. One thing that surprised me was that despite the ability to rename entities, create dashboards, or build automations, without using additional custom components, Claude is unable to make any changes to the configuration.yaml. It is possible to use an add-on to grant access to the configuration, but I didn’t have this installed.
When I was creating the sensors for my World Cup dashboard, for example, I had to add them to the configuration file manually, which soon became tiresome as Claude kept getting the code wrong, so there was a lot of copying and pasting. This was exactly what I was aiming to avoid by using HA-MCP.
In the end, I gave up on my experiment and rebuilt Home Assistant from scratch. While being able to build automations and dashboards using Claude is useful, you can always just ask Claude to create the YAML for automations or dashboards and paste it into Home Assistant yourself, which is what I ended up having to do some of the time anyway. While it’s a bit more effort, you don’t need to expose your smart home to an AI company or risk having it delete everything you’ve ever built.
AI can be useful but it’s not a silver bullet
My time using the HA-MCP was interesting, but I’m not going to use it going forward. While it makes some things a lot easier, there are plenty of downsides, too. It’s tempting to rely on AI to do everything for you, but I’d rather maintain some control, and keep my smart home as private and local as possible.
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
