Posts tagged: home-assistant

• Confessions about my smart home

  Frenck (lead engineer of Home Assistant) breaks down the state of his smart home. While you might assume the lead engineer of a home automation platform has everything figured out, it’s fun to hear that’s far from the truth.

  …my dashboards are so bad that if I turn on the “Coffee machine” switch, it actually powers on my 3D Printer. 🤦‍♂️

  I keep seeing examples of this - lead developers and experts in their field often don’t have the perfect environment - they are focused on the things they want to do and often the pursuit of the ideal environment falls by the wayside.

  This is something I often need to remind myself about when I go on a yak shaving adventure tweaking my editor setup or finding the perfect tool for a job.

  Feb 24, 2025

• Exposing Home Assistant using Cloudflare Tunnel

  I use the wonderful Home Assistant on our home network for a variety of weird and wonderful automations and as a nice dashboard to all the devices in our home.

  Nothing on my home network can be reached from the outside world without a VPN. Unfortunately, that presents a few issues with Home Assistant:

  • Accessing the Home Assistant UI from out-and-about is a pain.
  • The Home Assistant app can't report useful information such as location data unless the device is connected to the VPN.
  • There are a number of integrations which use webhooks or similar to communicate data to your HA instance.

  So far, I've been living with these problems. Exposing my entire HA instance to the world isn't something I'm comfortable with.

  Read more →

  Apr 21, 2021