What it is for
The call rarely comes at a convenient hour. An update went sideways, the SD card gave up, or the server is stuck in a boot loop. Until Home Assistant is back, nothing in the house switches any more, and your customer is standing in the dark.
Local Fleet Control is built for exactly that half hour. It talks to the Shelly devices on the network directly, through their own HTTP interface. It needs neither Home Assistant nor a cloud, neither an account nor an internet connection. A list of devices with buttons, and nothing beyond that.
It is aimed first at integrators who want to hand their customers a safety net. A fallback tool, then, not a second dashboard: automations, scenes and history stay deliberately out of scope.
What this beta does
Network scan. A sweep across a CIDR range you choose. The machine’s own networks are offered as a suggestion but are not binding, so networks behind a VPN or a Tailscale subnet router can be scanned too, as long as a route exists. Only private address ranges are allowed, at most 1024 addresses per run.
Device detection. Generation, model, MAC address and any password protection are read from the device’s own response.
Projects. Several sites side by side, one of them active. Devices you find move into the project on click and stay there.
Rooms and categories. Freely defined and assignable per channel. A two-channel device can have channel 1 in the hallway and channel 2 in the bathroom. The list groups by either.
Custom names. One display name per channel. Without an entry, the name from the Shelly configuration applies.
Switching. On, off and toggle for relay and socket channels, Gen1 as well as Gen2 and Gen3. The state shown is always queried from the device and never guessed.
Five languages. Deutsch, English, Español, Français and Hrvatski, switchable at runtime. On first launch the system language applies, otherwise English.
What it cannot do yet
This is a beta, and these pieces are missing from version 0.1.0:
- Switching lights, dimmers and covers. Such devices are found and listed, but with a note that they are not controllable yet. Only relay channels get buttons.
- Signing in to password-protected devices. They show up in the list, but there is no field for credentials yet.
- Update notice. The planned check against the release API is not built. That is exactly why this version makes no internet connection at all.
- A settings view. The language picker sits in the window header as a stopgap.
- Search and filters across the device list.
- Exporting a finished configuration to the end customer. That is the next feature on the list.
- Android and iOS. This beta is Windows only.
The core is covered by automated tests: scan parsing, status parsing, the project model and the translations. Confirmed against real hardware so far are startup, language switching including persistence, and the scan on the developer’s own network with Shelly Gen2 and Gen3. Switching, scanning across a VPN subnet router and the project file on disk are still untested.
System requirements
| Requirement | Value |
|---|---|
| Operating system | Windows 10 version 1803 or newer (64-bit), or Windows 11 |
| Architecture | x64. No ARM64 build, no 32-bit version |
| Runtime | WebView2 (see the note above). .NET and Java are not needed |
| Privileges | No administrator rights. Nothing is installed, nothing is written to the registry |
| Network | An HTTP route to the devices, so the same LAN or a VPN. No port is opened |
What you get is a single file without an installer. That is on purpose: whoever is standing in front of a dark flat at night should not have to click through a setup wizard. Download, double-click, done. Updating means replacing the file; there is no auto-update.
Configuration lives in %APPDATA%\com.hafleetmanager.localfleetcontrol\, not next to the
executable. On someone else’s machine it therefore starts with an empty device list, and a
forgotten USB stick gives away no customer IPs.
Privacy and network behaviour
No account, no backend, no telemetry. This beta calls no internet address whatsoever; outbound connections only ever go to device IPs on the private network. The one exception is a click on “powered by HA Fleet Manager” in the footer, which opens this website in your browser.
The scan itself is read-only, and switching happens on an explicit click. Public address ranges are rejected, so the app is of no use as an internet port scanner. All data stays on the machine.
Feedback
Local Fleet Control is licensed under Apache-2.0 and is an open-source side project of HA Fleet Manager. The code is free; the name and the logo are not.
Feedback is genuinely welcome, especially about devices that are not detected or not switched. GitHub issues are the best channel. Telling us which Shelly generation and model is affected helps the most.