Re: I might possibly be interested - ask and you shall receive.
While not really cost-effective in onesies, I've developed my own "LAN of things" that I think satisfies your thoughts, and mine, completely. It's fairly well documented on my website, coultersmithing.com, and here's a post from today about a smart power strip I recently built a second copy of (they're handy).
http://www.coultersmithing.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=59&p=6717#p6717
No internet access required or allowed, and any machine with a web browser can control it. No ports are forwarded.
I do use a couple of specialized ESP8266's as well, and those talk to a master Raspberry Pi over wifi using UDP as well. That master pi runs NGINX, MySQL, some nice CGI's that use Gnuplot and perl to plot data from the database on things like the water system, the solar power system, weather in and outside of various buildings on campus and so forth.
I'm not quite alone, others seem to have done this for other things as well, more often using a raspberry pi as I did in the early days. Now I use a lot of ESPs of both flavors and just one main pi for the database and web server - most of the time. It's a lot easier to re-burn and replace an ESP than a whole pi, not to mention less expensive.
Of course, no one does this commercially. It seems even the pundits have failed to notice that the real business model of all these IoT morons is to collect your data and do profitable things with it, which deliberately isn't possible with this scheme. It's how they profit, not on the hardware sales.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
