That’s just Home Assistant OS packaged in OVA.

I’m using a WH2650A weather station, and I believe it does not need an internet connection to work at all, and I have been able to connect it to HA locally.

How does running your music service through a VPN improve privacy?

Why do you need to be behind VPN?

Turn on the lights in the bedroom based on presence sensor, but only if the bed occupancy sensor detects no one is in bed.

None of them required many cloud specifically, but you have to provide it with STT and TTS engines. You can use other 3rd party or run it on your own hardware, but to do it effectively (have it transcribe your voice in a second instead of 20) you need a GPU.

I am using a few of self-built assistants using https://github.com/formatBCE/Koala-Satellite/tree/main - which was heavily inspired and uses a lot of very similar hardware to HA Voice. I have to say my speakers turned out pretty great.

Because then we would still have Stalin and the Red Alert scenario. Somehow I believe that would be worse.

From Zigbee devices I’d highly recommend the ones from Ikea (Somrig, Styrbar, Symfonisk - depending on what you’re going to use it for), and there are a lot more on AliExpress.

Another route might be using ESPHome and program something like Cheap Yellow Display (5-10$ on AliExpress) with LVGL.

I have had this for a while, I believe I have enabled experimental features on it.