Secondary home management experience with Home Assistant

TL;DR

Taking advantage of the unofficial integration I connect two instances of Home Assistant to each other. Thanks to the Wireguard addons I am able to avoid the fact that the 4G modem does not have a public IP address.

Intro

Due to the 2G shutdown in Switzerland, I had to change the heating management system of the second house in the mountains. After some attempts for more than a year a working and resilient solution has been in operation. I had already described some attempts in previous posts, here I collect the experience after more than a year of operation.

Watch camera from secondary home in Home Assistant

I wrote a post not long time ago about managing my secondary home with Home Assistant. Thanks to component the magic is possible, but an HA update has complicated things a bit. A few days ago there was the problem that the component could no longer connect with remote instances and since always (for me) it is not possible to view remote rooms.

Remote instances connection problem

The first case can be solved by updating the component to the latest version (> 3.4 or master) and install it also in remote instances. Moreover in the remote instances you have to add 2 simple lines to the configuration:

Child control for Sonos speakers

TL;DR

Using an ESP32 and Home Assistant with ESPhome you can control Sonos speakers (or other media players) without smartphone application. This is my project to allow my daughter to manage the music in our home (whenever we want).

Intro

We are in the process of fixing up a house and it’s time to do some major cleaning among all the stuff we’ve accumulated. In a cleaning raid an old baby cassette recorder was discovered, unfortunately it is no longer working (I will get it working eventually). This find made us alert to the fact that our little girl can’t easily listen to music since it’s all streaming now and you need apps on your phone to listen to it. Not like it was in our day when we were young….

Secondary home management with Home Assistant

When you get caught up in smart homes you can’t stop and want to automate everything. I started with the second home in the mountains and then got caught up. In this post I want to collect my experiences in managing the second home, specifically with Home Assistant.

The big problem is that the LTE router doesn’t have a public IP address and I have to leverage a VPN to access the second home’s network from the outside.

My experience with Home Assistant

A letter from Swisscom arrived two years ago and created a problem for the management of the heating of the house in the mountains. Because they informed us of the termination in end of 2020 of the GSM or 2G (old generation telephony) service. The current modem in the control module installed 7 years ago is not compatible with 3G or higher and therefore needed to be replaced. But with what?