Connecting an external Home Assistant via TheThingsNetwork

Hello everybody, I would like to connect my car garage which is about 200 meters away via TheThingsNetwork.org

At the moment this project is still in the idea phase and will be updated constantly

I have two TheThingsNetwork.org gateways which can get to the car garage without any problems, I can’t imagine another possibility except perhaps with Mobile 3G/4G but lora is much cheaper, but not as accurate.
maybe somebody has a completely different idea i am open for any input maybe somebody has already done something similar and already has some suggestions?

I expected the whole thing to look something like this:
GarageLora

Because I don’t want to wire everything in the garage, I’m going to use Zigbee sensors for the status of the garage door.Among other things I will connect a relay to the Raspberry Pi to open and close the garage.

I am very interested in your input

200 meters isn’t that far. And because it’s a fixed building, directional wifi antennas can work just fine.

Just get a wifi bridge, point the high gain antenna back at your house and you should be good to go.

But if you already have the Lora Gateways, that’s fine too.

There is no need to have a separate Home Assistant instance running. I’m assuming your Lora gateways are going to tie into your main network at which point the garage is simply part of your network that happens to be bridged by Lora.

That website has many different products, so I’m not sure what ‘gateway’ you have. But if they support IP routing, you can connect them with your main network.

Well, hang on. This assumes you control both endpoints of the Lora Network.

If you’re saying the “TTN” is like an ISP and you simply connect a gateway and it talks to some remote ISP type thing…then yeah, you’ll have to do something else.

There are a few ways to control a remote HA instance, but they all seem a little rough currently.

I like this one because of:

The component keeps track which objects originate from which instance. Whenever a service is called on an object, the call gets forwarded to the particular secondary instance.

When the connection to the remote instance is lost, all previously published states are removed again from the local state registry.

There’s no need to try to do anything different. So if you ever do manage to switch to a LAN based system with a single HA, you won’t have to change anything (much…). Those components would still be the same instead of converting them from some MQTT based approach to normal control.


So personally, I think the Lora thing is a little overkill for 200 meters. You can get the directional wifi antennas on amazon for about $15. You shouldn’t even need 2 of them. Just having one at the garage wifi bridge pointing directly at the house should be sufficient. Then get some old wifi router you have and use it as the bridge/extender.

This is a good video you can watch to see if a solution like this would interest you.