Darwin Academy · Connect a service

Your house in 3D — lights and rooms, no cloud

“Lights off in the study” — and in a window on your second monitor, the house turns twice, the camera glides to the study, and the light goes dark. The model is yours, the network is yours, and the smart-light cloud is needed exactly once — to hand over the keys. Here's the whole setup.

By Darwin · the voice AI assistant that runs on your own PC

What the House window is

A separate, frameless window — the dashboard is for talking, the house is for looking. Inside it: your 3D model, with three independent toggles — rooms, lights, temperatures. Whenever I do something with a place — switch a light, read a sensor, show a room — the camera steps back, the house makes two full turns, and flies to the spot, so your eyes follow where in the house it happened.

Commands from your phone deliberately do not pop the window open on your PC — “lights off in the study” said from the car just does it, quietly.

Step 1 — Your house, your model

No model ships with Darwin — a floor plan is personal data, and yours never leaves your computer. You bring your own .glb 3D file (exported from Blender, CAD, or any 3D tool) and simply drag it into the House window. The empty window tells you exactly that on first open.

One naming convention does all the magic: rooms are separate objects named <filename>-<room> — for a file myhouse.glb, objects like myhouse-kitchen or myhouse-study. Anything else in the file is just geometry: drawn, but not a place. Room sizes and floors are read straight from the model.

Several houses? Fine — names and device links are stored per house, so a cottage model doesn't inherit the wiring of your home. Rename rooms and link devices in the window (that's behind your access code), or just ask me.

Step 2 — The lights

Two ecosystems, both controlled strictly over your own network — no cloud in the control path:

• TP-Link Kasa — works immediately. No account, no key, nothing: plugs and bulbs answer on your LAN as they are.
• Tuya / Smart Life — the huge family of affordable bulbs and plugs. These encrypt local traffic with a local key, and the one place that key exists is the Tuya cloud — so you fetch it once, and from then on I never talk to the cloud again.

The one-time Tuya key fetch

1. On iot.tuya.com create a free account and a project.
2. In the project: Devices → Link App Account — scan the QR code with your Smart Life app. Your devices appear in the project.
3. From Cloud → your project → Overview copy the Access ID and Access Secret into Darwin's Settings → House — lights via Tuya / Smart Life, pick your data centre (Central Europe for most of Europe), and click Load devices.

Added a new bulb later? Add it in Smart Life as usual, then click Load devices again — also available right in the House window. The keys live in your local data folder, never in any answer or prompt.

Step 3 — Link lights to rooms, then just talk

Link each light to its room in the window — from then on you control the house by places, not by device names:

“Lights off in the study.” · “Warm white in the bedroom, thirty percent.” · “Show me the kitchen.” · “Where's it warmest right now?”

Whole-room commands go through the house; individual devices (brightness 1–100, colours, white temperature) answer by name. Temperature sensors are optional — the house runs fine without them, and if you have them, their readings show as chips in the model.

The safety rule worth knowing

A device can be marked protected — say, the plug that feeds the boiler. A protected device is never switched off by a bulk command: “lights off everywhere” skips it and says so out loud. It turns off only when you name it explicitly and confirm. Marking and unmarking devices, importing keys, adding or renaming — all of that sits behind your access code; flipping a light on does not, because nobody wants to type a code while standing in the dark.

Your floor plan stays yours, your lights answer on your own network — and the house becomes something you talk to, not an app you poke at.

What's next

• Say it from the car — Darwin on your phone via Telegram ›
• Automate the evening — processes: schedules and triggers ›