4 ms·
Show HN: Merliot – plugging physical devices into LLMs
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?
- chrisdalke 1y agoCool! 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.
- trillic 1y ago"There's a botter way" https://www.marksetbot.com/ https://www.marksetbot.com/ (not affiliated, just a fan)
- sfeldma 1y agoYa, 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 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 1y agoThis seems like a residential address. Irrespective of whether the creator deliberately exposed it, I would be a little bit cautious about sharing it further.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Kevcmk 1y ago"What could go wrong?"
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- fitsumbelay 1y agovery neat.
- rybosome 1y agoI 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 1y agoImagine 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 1y agoI cannot understand this optimism, in my industry the profits of automation only flow upwards.
- kevindamm 1y agoMy 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 1y agoWhile 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 1y ago[dead]
- gitroom 1y ago[dead]
- A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 1y agoIt is a weirdly exciting time to be alive.
- seebeen 1y ago[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- alxjrvs 1y agoFeels like the kind of headline that would briefly pause in front of the camera to establish how the world got "like this".
- hughw 1y agoFeels like a "what could possibly go wrong" thing.
- imhoguy 1y ago"Open the pod bay doors, HAL"...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- gus_massa 1y agoMovie 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 1y agoYou don't need to enable the AI; it's optional. The web app has a full UI to manually work with your devices.
- spaceport 1y agoIve 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"
- darkwater 1y agoIsn't Home Assistant already doing this?
- neonwatty 1y agosure there's projects like https://github.com/acon96/home-llm https://github.com/acon96/home-llm but its early days for integration like this
- neonwatty 1y agocue the curb theme song
- neonwatty 1y agoautomating 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.