Dear lemmy community,

I am currently in the process of migrating my current Homebridge setup to HA OS on a Pi4 4GB, and I’m still discovering and trying to understand its possibilities and limitations.

I’m currently wondering how I would be able to access my devices remotely. I have a FritzBox Router, setup with WireGuard VPN to access my network remotely. I have been able to access HA this way before, but I’d like to be able to “see” my devices without having to turn on the VPN every time.

An idea occurred to me, although not sure if it would work: would I be able to see or get updates from my devices (even if limitedly) through the HomeKit integration in HA?

I am aware this potential solution would mean my devices connecting to apple’s cloud, but that’s a tradeoff I’m willing to take for the many benefits HA brings to the table (in my case, energy consumption logging).

  • Fermiverse@kbin.social
    2·
    9 months ago

    I don’t use HA but FHEM and what I do to retrieve data from my homecontrol is using a telegram bot.

    In telegram you can setup buttons when formatting messages, so my bot shows me the control menu with predefined actions. One action is to show my power consumption at home.

    There is no need to open ports as the telegram bot polls the same way you cell phone does.

    Also the bot only communicates to known clients that I predefined before, so nobody can see or control my home network.

    Maybe something similar is possible in HA.

    • possum@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      2·
      9 months ago

      Hey, thanks for the hint! I’ll need to read more about FHEM since it’s the first time I hear about it (how do people even find out about it?), there’s a lot going on for me here, but it’s nice to see there are more options out there.

      • Fermiverse@kbin.social
        2·
        9 months ago

        I checked and there is basically no need to switch to fhem if you have a working environment as in HA the connection/use of a telegram bot is also possible.