A Home Assistant Alternative That Lives on the Home Computer
A Home Assistant alternative for people who want the ESP32 on a computer they own. The board joins the MATA home computer on the LAN. Dashboards are not copied.
Is there a Home Assistant alternative that keeps my ESP32 on a computer I own?
There is a path, and it is not a copy of Home Assistant. A Janus ESP32 can mint its own identity, join the LAN, and speak the protocol the MATA home computer already uses to list a device. The Home screen does not play that stream yet. Home Assistant dashboards, automations, and YAML are not imported.
A Home Assistant alternative is what people type when the Pi in the closet has become a second job. The dashboard is theirs. The ESP32 in the hallway is often not: it was flashed from an example, it phones a broker, or it only makes sense inside one installation. This page is for that search. It says what dldeploy and the MATA home computer actually offer an ESP32, what the Rust RTOS underneath that future board has already proved, and what a person keeps if they stay on Home Assistant.
This is not a coat of paint on Home Assistant core. That core is a listed non-goal, next to Matter and RainMaker, and the reason is written in a smart home without the cloud. A Home Assistant alternative here means a different home: a computer you own, a board that mints its own key, and a mesh that does not require a vendor account. The computer is Home on MATA. The crates are the Janus family at Remade With Rust.
What a Home Assistant user is actually searching for
Most of the search is not "give me another YAML dialect." It is "the sensor should answer to my house." Home Assistant got a generation of people there, on hardware they could touch, and then the installation itself became the product: updates, add-ons, a broker, a dashboard that has to stay up. A Home Assistant alternative that only redraws that dashboard has not changed the thing that broke.
The board, not the screenshot
The piece that leaves the house, or fails to, is usually the ESP32. A camera, a presence board, a switch. In this family that board is flashed from a short manifest, described in deploy an ESP32 at home in an afternoon. It mints a did:mata on first boot, through rusty_esp_mid. The owner adopts it with a signature. On a real XIAO ESP32-S3 Sense, a stranger replaying the owner's record was refused. That is the ownership a Home Assistant alternative has to have before it has a pretty card.
The radio and the flash decide which board can do it. Choosing an ESP32 board is that table. Eight megabytes of flash is the floor for the mesh node. The XIAO is the silicon row. A 4 MB ESP32-CAM never runs the node and joins through a bridge.
What a Home Assistant alternative here will not copy
Dashboards, automations, voice-assistant skills, and an importer for the config you already wrote are not on this page because they are not the job. Home Assistant remains the place those files live. A Home Assistant alternative that promised to open your existing installation unchanged would be advertising a converter it does not have. The honest offer is a new device, aimed at a home computer, that never needed that installation.
How the ESP32 meets the MATA home computer
Home is the household function on a machine you keep. A Home Assistant alternative that ends at the board, with no computer to adopt it, is just another firmware. The seam is named. rusty_esp_iroh speaks mata-oem-sidecar/rpc/1, the home computer's existing JSON protocol, so a device can be cataloged without a second account and without a change at the other end. The mesh is iroh. The longer note on that seam is the MATA Home integration.
What has run
On the XIAO ESP32-S3 Sense the node was up 3.2 seconds after boot. A camera run delivered 721 packets in 60 seconds, none lost. The subscriber in that run was a laptop client, not the Home screen. You can open a camera page on the LAN. The home computer's media controller is not wired to that stream. A Home Assistant alternative that claimed the picture was already inside Home would be ahead of the code.
Reach from outside the house is written for boards with PSRAM and has not been measured. The no-PSRAM tier is LAN-direct on purpose. A Home Assistant alternative for a household that needs the phone to work from the grocery store is not finished. The LAN path is the one with a number.
The track the firmware is on today
The node that has run is the std track: Rust on ESP-IDF. There is no C in the house crates. The radio blob is still Espressif's, and ESP-IDF still brings its own kernel. A Home Assistant alternative built on that track is already a device you can reason about. It is not yet a device whose scheduler is ours.
The RTOS that board is growing into
Kairos is the family that remakes FreeRTOS in Rust: rusty_rtos_kernel for the scheduler, rusty_rtos_port for the CPUs, rusty_rtos_heap for the heaps, and the LTS libraries beside them. The C kernel is the oracle, not a dependency of what ships. FreeRTOS is the thing the traces are diffed against. The language is Rust.
Proved on a desk, and on an S3
On the simulator, nine of nine scheduler scenarios matched, 8,408,764 trace lines identical at 100,000 ticks. On a XIAO ESP32-S3 the conformance corpus was byte-identical to the C kernel, 18 of 18. The same part has run one kernel across both cores: two spins in parallel, and 2,000 cross-core hand-offs at 16.1 microseconds each. Tick, switch, and wake-from-interrupt were counted on silicon: 54, 166, and 430 cycles. Flash for that image was 15,950 bytes against the C map's 13,924. A task record was 207 bytes against 596. A Home Assistant alternative that is serious about the ESP32 has to be able to say whose scheduler is underneath, and these are the rows for ours.
rusty_rtos_mqtt has matched coreMQTT function for function, 218 of 218. It takes send and receive callbacks. The TCP crate under those callbacks is still planned. So the MQTT library is not a broker you drop in beside Home Assistant, and it is not how the current Janus node talks to the home computer. The home computer path is the iroh seam above, not an MQTT topic tree.
What has not moved
The camera firmware and the mesh firmware you flash from this site still use ESP-IDF's kernel. The plan for the bare-metal track is that rusty_rtos becomes the kernel the radio blob schedules on, and the first Janus firmware in that line is a C6 mesh node. That move is not the firmware a household flashes today. Tickless idle has run on the S3. The joint of kernel plus radio plus home computer has not.
A Home Assistant alternative is allowed to be early if it says so. The part you can hold is an ESP32 with its own key, on your LAN, aimed at a MATA home computer. The part you can read is a scheduler that has already matched FreeRTOS on the same class of chip. The part you should not expect this week is your old dashboard, or a kernel swap inside the camera image. The Connect vision is the mesh half. The Learn index is every row that has a time on it.
A Home Assistant alternative, for this house, is that trade made in public: leave the installation, keep the building, and let the board answer to a computer in the room.
FAQ
Quick answers for builders evaluating this technology.
Does this Home Assistant alternative import my Home Assistant YAML?
No. Automations, dashboards, add-ons, and ESPHome configs stay where they are. The move, when you make it, is a new device flashed for the home computer, not a conversion of the old config.
Can an ESP32 already appear to the MATA home computer?
The seam is named and the mesh has run. On a XIAO ESP32-S3 Sense the node was up 3.2 seconds after boot and delivered 721 camera packets in 60 seconds with none lost. The subscriber in that run was a laptop. The home computer's media view is not wired to that stream.
Does every ESP32 run the mesh by itself?
A board with at least 8 MB of flash on the ESP-IDF track can. The XIAO is the one measured on silicon. A 4 MB board, such as an ESP32-CAM, never runs iroh and reaches the mesh through a bridge. Reach from outside the house is written for the PSRAM tier and not measured.
Has the Rust RTOS replaced FreeRTOS on the ESP32?
Not in the camera and mesh firmware you would flash this week. That firmware still sits on ESP-IDF. The Rust scheduler has matched FreeRTOS on a XIAO ESP32-S3, including both cores. Becoming the kernel under the radio is the next move, and it has not shipped.
Will I get Home Assistant dashboards, voice skills, or Matter?
No. Those are listed non-goals, along with RainMaker and Home Assistant core. What you get is a device the household owns, on the LAN, aimed at the home computer. A vendor app and a voice skill are the things this path leaves behind.