House Control: A Live 3D Model of Your Smart Home in the Mac Menu Bar and on iPhone

You get home, grab your phone to turn on the lights, then fiddle with the AC from the couch. Once you’ve got enough smart-home apps, you can remember which platform runs which lamp, but not how bright the living room actually is right now. When HomeKit, Smart Life (Tuya), Home Assistant and a Hue bridge each run their own corner of the house, the “unified dashboard” usually ends up as yet another list.

House Control comes at it from a different angle: it turns your home into a live 3D model that sits in your Mac’s menu bar (it can even pop out as a little island next to the notch), with the same floor plan synced to your iPhone. When a light is on, it actually glows in the scene; when the AC is running, you see the airflow. Details checked on October 17, 2026.

What it looks like day to day

The repo is 0xProbabillity/house-control: about 520 stars at the time of writing, MIT-licensed, written in Swift. The latest release, v1.0.0 (October 15, 2026), ships HouseControl-1.0.0.dmg with a sha256 checksum and a GitHub Actions build attestation.

Click the little house in the menu bar and the dropdown is your home in 3D. Click a light to toggle it, drag a light tile sideways to dim it, and tap the AC to set temperature, mode and fan speed. Click a room to zoom in and see only that room’s devices. Next to the icon you get an at-a-glance summary of how many lights are on and the AC’s target temperature, for example 6 · 23°. On displays without a notch, the island is drawn in the middle of the menu bar.

It ships with Apartment and Studio demo floor plans, and until you sign in to a platform every device is simulated. That makes it easy to play with the interface before you hand over any real accounts.

Getting started (a bit more involved than “just another control app”)

Mac minimum requirements

If you want to edit floor plans or build it yourself

• Xcode Command Line Tools and Swift 5.9+; the web UI needs Node 20.19+ or 22.12+
• git clone, then ./scripts/build-app.sh and open build/HouseControl.app
• If you rebuild often and also sync with an iPhone, sign it with your own Development certificate, or the local network permission prompt will keep coming back

iPhone

• It can draw floor plans and connect platforms on its own, without a Mac, and then pair with a Mac for two-way sync
• Building it yourself needs Xcode 16+, XcodeGen and iOS 17+. There’s an App Store flavor (Home Assistant, Hue and Apple Home) and a TestFlight/self-built flavor that adds Smart Life. Smart Life support uses the same Tuya sign-in approach as Home Assistant’s integration, so it stays out of the App Store build

This isn’t a one-click consumer package that runs your whole house the moment it’s downloaded. It’s not notarized and the iPhone side often means building it yourself. In exchange you get no account of its own, no telemetry and fully public code.

Connecting your devices

The Connections panel in the editor lets you mix platforms, all at the same time:

State sync: changes from Home Assistant and Hue show up quickly, and the docs say Smart Life updates within about 12 seconds. Everything is stored as JSON under ~/Library/Application Support/HouseControl/ (session tokens get 600 permissions), and the app runs no backend of its own. The only optional outbound path is a Cloudflare quick tunnel when you turn on AI Access.

Going further: AI Access and widgets

Right-click the menu bar icon, choose AI Access… and hit Start. You get a private link protected by a 128-bit key to give ChatGPT, Claude and friends, or an MCP endpoint to add as a custom connector or via claude mcp add. Locally it only listens on 127.0.0.1 and goes out through the tunnel. Permissions are opt-in checkboxes, every request shows up live in the window, and once you hit Stop or the timer runs out, the address is gone. You can even have the assistant rebuild a room in 3D from a photo. That’s fun, and it also means you should keep an eye on that window while the tunnel is open.

There are also home screen and desktop widgets, plus Lock Screen and Control Center controls (newer OS versions get more), and one-tap scenes like “Movie” or “Night”. Under the hood it’s a native Swift shell with a Three.js web UI, deliberately avoiding Electron.

Privacy and the chain of trust

The author chose not to notarize on purpose: an Apple Developer certificate stamps your legal name into every copy you distribute. House Control uses ad-hoc signing instead and earns trust through public source, GitHub Actions builds and sha256 checksums plus attestations. To verify:

shasum -a 256 -c HouseControl-1.0.0.dmg.sha256
gh attestation verify HouseControl-1.0.0.dmg --repo 0xProbabillity/house-control

(Attestations start with 1.0.0; the 0.1.0 build, made while the repo was still private, only has a checksum.) To uninstall, quit from the menu bar icon and delete the app. To wipe your floor plans and connection settings too, remove ~/Library/Application Support/HouseControl/.

What’s good

• 3D plus the menu bar and notch packs in a lot of information, and it matches the instinct of “glance at the house” better than a plain list.
• Four platforms can be mixed, and the demo floor plans let you try it with no real devices, so experimenting costs nothing.
• MIT-licensed, no mandatory account, and releases come with checksums and provenance, so the trust model is easy to understand.
• AI Access and MCP keep “talk to an assistant to control the lights” behind an optional switch; by default it’s still a local panel.

What’s lacking

• Not notarized: explaining “Open Anyway” on a family member’s computer will test your patience, and managed corporate Macs may block it outright.
• Lights and air conditioning are the main focus. Whether sensors, locks or curtains work for you is something to check against your device list and the Issues first.
• Getting the full iPhone experience is a high bar for regular users (building it yourself or TestFlight). Don’t assume you can search the App Store and find a build with Tuya support.
• You have to draw or edit the 3D floor plan yourself, and the first room takes real time.
• AI Access assumes you understand tunnels and permission boundaries. Pasting that link into a group chat is like handing out a remote for your appliances.

Who it’s for

• People whose Mac is always on, who already use Smart Life, Home Assistant, Hue or HomeKit, and who are tired of switching between apps.
• Fans of menu bar tools who are fine with the self-serve trust chain of open-source software (checking sha256 and attestations).
• Anyone who wants Claude or ChatGPT to optionally control the lights, with a Stop button that really cuts it off.

If you have one smart bulb, only use a single vendor’s app and never touch a Mac, there’s no reason to build a 3D model. But if your living room has turned into a jungle of platforms, spend an evening learning the controls on a demo floor plan, then draw your first floor. House Control’s “see the whole house at a glance” feels far better than installing yet another list app.

Related reading

• LocalSend: send files between your phone and computer
• Everything: instant file search for Windows

Links

• Repo: https://github.com/0xProbabillity/house-control
• Releases: https://github.com/0xProbabillity/house-control/releases
• Connection guides are in the repo’s docs/ folder (smart-life, connections, ai-access)