“LoraHome”
I don’t know the specifics on how it could be implemented, but I would love to see some official support to send and receive data to/from Home Assistant via LoraWan. A great start would be to create a standard similar to BT Home, where the community can extent upon an open API. Here are some ideas, what this could provide…
Receiving data
- When receiving data, you could track your vehicle long before it would reach your home (useful for pre-heating the house)
- You could create local trackers for pets / belongings with multiple kilometers of range
Sending data
- You could control devices on large properties wirelessly
- You could provide basic information to your environment as a service / on request (NTP, Warning-Information, Adress to coordinate resolvers, relay “Meshtastic” messages)
Meshing
- Home Assistant could Mesh to other HA-Instances so the network could be extended automatically
- Your “LoraHome”-devices could send data encrypted over the LoraWan-Mesh-Network
- You could “pair” HA-instances together, so state-changes of one entity could be forwarded to another HA-instance (This could work similar to bluetooth, where you would have to enter a code on the other side to pair a device)
Some problems
Bandwidth limitation
In order to cope with bandwidth limitations, some form of Quality of service / Prioritization should be build into the system. For example: If to many sensors are shared between “paired” HA-instances, then it should stop updating the other Instance via LoraWan immediately and only update periodically.
Range limitation
While LoraWan is considered long range, every communication has it’s range-limit. Some concerns could be eliminated with meshing locally. For even larger range it would be great if sensors could send sensor-information securely by a strangers HA-instance to the nabu-casa-cloud or something similar like “network-peer2peer”. Of course this could be some form of opt-in for privacy reasons, but it would greatly improve the system globally.
Footnote
- These are just some ideas from me. Feel free to improve and extend on these ideas in the comments below.
- Also while we are at it, we could create a standard for 433 Mhz as well.
