Who's behind this
Engineer-built, in Plano.
Backyard-Aware Craft is a small operation founded by a working engineering leader who got tired of "smart" home gear that goes dumb the moment a vendor's API gets rate-limited, deprecated, or put behind a subscription.
Background
Backyard-Aware Craft is built by a working engineering leader with more than two decades of big-tech experience — reliability platforms at financial-infrastructure scale, production automation tools used by thousands of engineers, and a long tail of open-source contributions. The day-job skills — distributed systems, observability, failure-mode thinking — turn out to be exactly the wrong-shaped tools to build out of stock smart-home gear and exactly the right-shaped tools to build something that fails gracefully through power cuts, storms, and the slow death of a DIY vendor's cloud business model.
Every installation runs on documented configuration files. The same packages that run the founder's own house in Plano run yours, tuned to your sensors. There's no proprietary integrator magic. If you ever decide to take over the system yourself, the whole config lives on your Pi, in your house.
What "local-first" actually means.
A lot of vendors say "local control" and then quietly require their cloud for setup, app login, automation triggers, or firmware updates. We mean it more strictly.
- No Honeywell cloud.Thermostat is Z-Wave, S2-paired, controlled locally. Honeywell Home app is never opened.
- No Ecowitt cloud.Weather data is read from the gateway over your LAN. No ecowitt.net account, no API call out.
- No GPS sharing.Presence comes from Apple Home Away mode. The HA Companion app never gets location permission.
- No subscriptions.No SaaS line item lights up in your credit card statement. Forecasts come from public NWS / met.no pulls.
- No scope creep.We quote a fixed scope, do that scope, and invoice accordingly. If we find something at the audit that changes the quote, you get a revised estimate before any work begins.