A Genkan playbook

The Switcheroo: take over the wifi without touching a single device.

Your kids have six, eight, ten devices between them, and every one already knows the wifi name and password by heart. Reconnecting them all would take a weekend and three arguments. So don't. Move the house, not the furniture.

Runs in your house, on your hardware No telemetry. Your kids' traffic is never sent anywhere MIT open source. Point your own AI at it and ask
Watch the trick

Same name, same password, new engine underneath.

THE INTERNET your router Kauri Fernbird searching for “Kauri”… Genkan box new AP Kauri a phone the Chromebook the iPad a mate's phone Ada's Ben's shared guest · pausable
Tonight, before you start One wifi network, "Kauri", goes straight to the internet. Every device in the house already knows its name and password.
The idea in one line

Give the new filtered network the same name and password as the old one.

Every device reconnects on its own, notices nothing, and is quietly now behind your gateway. No app to install, no setting to change, no argument.

01Rename your real network. Your existing router's wifi gets a new name, say Fernbird, and a new password. That is now the grown-ups' network: yours, your partner's, work devices. Nobody's device knows this name, so nobody drifts onto it by accident.
02Stand up the new Kauri. Factory reset a spare access point (an old router, a mesh satellite, a cheap dedicated AP), put it in Access Point mode, and give it the old name and the old password.
03Wire it to the gateway. The new Kauri plugs into your Genkan box. The gateway hands out the addresses, does the filtering, keeps the logs, enforces the time limits.
04Watch them roll in. As phones and laptops come back into range, they see the name they trust, with the password they already have, and reconnect themselves. Each one appears on your dashboard, ready to be named and assigned.

That is the whole trick. The kids changed nothing. Their friends changed nothing. The network they always used just got a new engine under the bonnet.

The honest part

Read this before you enjoy yourself too much.

Genkan's whole ethos is that this works better when it is not a secret. The Switcheroo is a convenience. It saves you reconnecting a dozen devices; it is not a way to spy. We strongly suggest you still tell the kids, in plain words, that the home network is filtered and time-managed now, and why. Especially the teenagers: the day a 16-year-old discovers a hidden filter is the day they move to mobile data and you lose all visibility.

"Same wifi, and by the way it looks after you now" beats "gotcha" every time. The trick saves your evening; the honesty saves the relationship.

Won't

Touch mobile data. A phone on 4G never comes near your wifi. That is a job for the phone itself (Family Link and friends).

Will

Keep everything it learns in your house. The device list, the names you give them and the logs all live on your own box. Nothing is uploaded, because there is nowhere to upload it to.

Won't

Read inside apps. You see the sites devices reach, never the messages inside Snapchat or Discord. Genkan is a gateway, not a wiretap.

Naming your networks

Familiarity is the whole point.

The grown-ups' network

Something clearly "not for kids". A business name, your name, anything they will not reflexively join. New password, kept to the adults.

The kids' network

The old, familiar name and password, unchanged. Devices trust names, not cables, and that trust is what carries them onto the island.

The payoff

What you get the moment it is live.

  • Every device on the kids' network shows up to be labelled ("Ada's Chromebook") and assigned to a person.
  • Friends' devices appear too. You can see them, and you can pause them, so a visiting mate cannot quietly stream until 2am on your wifi.
  • One sentence to your assistant, "dinner", "kill gaming", "give Ben 30 more minutes", and it happens across the whole island.
Under the bonnetWhy the devices do not notice

A device remembers a network by its name and password, not by the box behind them. Give the new access point the same two and every phone, console, tablet and telly rejoins on its own, because as far as they are concerned nothing happened.

What changed is who hands out the addresses. They now come from Genkan instead of your old router, and that hand-off is the moment filtering, metering and bedtimes start applying. No app to install, no profile to accept, no device to touch.

The friend problem, solved. When your kid's mate joins (and they will, they have your password), their phone lands on the filtered island like everyone else. Genkan tags devices you have not claimed as guests: filtered, but controllable separately. Pause the guests without pausing your kids, or the other way round, whichever the evening needs.

A visiting kid and a visiting grandparent are not the same guest, so Genkan does not pretend they are. Mark them guest-child or guest-adult and "streaming off for the kids at 11pm" sweeps up every child in the house, including the one on the sofa bed, and leaves the grown-ups' film alone. Visiting adults are filtered for malware and adult content only: no time limit, and no per-person logging, because somebody who borrowed your wifi did not sign up to be watched.

Set up your Genkan box first See the full topology