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).
I also have a VPN set up to my home network that I can connect to with my mobile devices. once connected I use the HA mobile app pathed to my local HA server IP. I don’t use HA cloud or any other cloud service. It works well for me, I obviously can’t get notification on the mobile when not connected but I have not had a need yet. If/When I’m do want notifications I would most likely explore, e-mail, e-mail to SMS, SMS API or something that won’t involve external servers. I would not want to send sensitive info via SMS but a shot alert that said there is something to look at like “HA Alert: Motion detected cam 1” or such would be fine.