Clarifying different Integration approaches?

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1

If I understand HA Integrations correctly, they can potentially connect three classes of things to HA:

  1. local devices
  2. local hubs
  3. cloud hubs

I’ve had a pretty easy time doing classes 1 and 2 with different manufacturer integrations, but I’ve recently stumbled on doing class 3.

Take the Tapo Integration, for example. My Tapo cameras are located off of the LAN where HA is running. They connect nicely with the TP-Link app using my TP-Link cloud account.

Now, let’s suppose I want to use HA to view these cameras. The first thing the TP-Link Smart Home Integration does is ask for the host name or the device’s IP address.

That sounds like a class 1 or class 2 question and certainly doesn’t even hint at a class 3 connection. How does a user figure out which class their device falls into?

If anyone can clarify this, it would be greatly appreciated. We all sometimes get stuck in the weeds of making things work and miss the overall strategy. I have a feeling that the Tapo Integration is class 1, but it sure would be helpful for me to better understand all of this.

2

The Tapo integration is a local polling integration, as it states on the on the integration documentation page. It’s useful for you, as a user, to know the class of integration so that your expectations are set correctly on how it will work, and how certain types of failures will affect it, but you do not need to concern yourself with choosing the integration class for your devices.

3

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4

I was wrong to categorize integrations into only 3 classes. There are actually 5, as clearly pointed out by the reference provided by @atlflyer. Many thanks.