LocalThings: Control Samsung Appliances Locally

My washing machine has a Wi-Fi chip, and I always assumed that meant one thing: an account, an app, and a quiet stream of data heading to somebody's server. Samsung's SmartThings works that way. LocalThings is the interesting refusal of that deal: a free, open-source Home Assistant integration that talks to Samsung appliances directly, over your home network, with no cloud account at all.

What it actually does

LocalThings connects Home Assistant to Samsung washers, dryers, refrigerators, air conditioners, ovens, dishwashers and about a dozen other appliance types that normally live in the SmartThings app. Instead of routing every command through Samsung's servers, it speaks the standards the appliances themselves implement: OCF, the Open Connectivity Foundation specification, over encrypted CoAP sessions, on your LAN.

The result looks like a normal Home Assistant device. Power, program and mode selection, start, pause and stop, temperatures and setpoints, time remaining, door and child-lock state, energy use, filter status and alarms, depending on what each model reports. Appliances that support push send changes as they happen; the rest get polled every 30 seconds. After setup, the integration never contacts Samsung's servers, and it keeps working if your internet goes down.

One honesty note: LocalThings removes the cloud from your control path, not from the appliance. The appliance keeps its own connection to Samsung, and LocalThings doesn't change that. If you want the machine fully offline, that's a firewall decision, not an integration setting.

Setup is an IP address

Installation is about as friendly as Home Assistant gets. LocalThings is in the default HACS list, so you search, download and restart. To add an appliance, you enter its IP address; the integration works out the type and model on its own and creates the matching controls and sensors. Most Samsung appliances from about 2022 onward work this way.

Two wrinkles worth knowing. When you add your first appliance, LocalThings contacts Samsung's servers once, with no account or login, to read a public identifier; later appliances skip that step entirely. And some models are fussier: certain appliances refuse the automatic certificate and ask for a pre-shared key, while older ones (roughly 2018 to 2022, on TCP 8888) want a device token you request with remote control switched on at the machine. The README walks through these cases model by model.

The fine print

• You need Home Assistant. This is an integration, not an app. If you're not running Home Assistant (or willing to), LocalThings is a reason to start, not a shortcut around it.

• Coverage is best on 2022-and-newer appliances. Some older washers, air conditioners and wall ovens work through the legacy interface, but expect gaps.

• Keep SmartThings installed anyway. Removing an appliance from SmartThings makes it reset its network settings and drop off Wi-Fi. The docs say so plainly, and it's the kind of sentence that saves a Saturday.

• One connection at a time. An appliance accepts a single local connection, and brief disconnects are normal; LocalThings reconnects and keeps the last values meanwhile.

• Remote start has rules. Ovens start only when mode, temperature and cook time arrive together, and microwave power modes can't be started remotely at all. Safety beats convenience here, rightly.

• Some energy counters depend on Samsung. On certain washers and dryers, the energy total stops increasing while the appliance can't reach SmartThings. LocalThings can only show what the machine records.

Verdict

If you have Samsung appliances and a Home Assistant box, this is close to a must-install: genuinely local control, fast updates, no account, and an honest README that tells you exactly where the edges are. The project is young (first commit in June 2026, already past 1,000 GitHub stars), MIT-licensed, and actively maintained: version 0.36.0 landed on November 2 with soundbar support and faster startup. New models get added quickly, because the maintainers usually only need a redacted diagnostics download.

If you don't run Home Assistant and don't want to, there's nothing here for you yet. For everyone else, it's the rare smart-home tool that makes your appliances a little dumber in exactly the right way.

Technical details and links are on the LocalThings fiche, and the project lives on GitHub.

Cover: official LocalThings logo from the project repository. Sources: the project README and the v0.36.0 release notes on GitHub. This is a documentation-based discovery, not a hands-on test; I haven't run it against my own appliances yet.