Hi,
I’m just got a couple of of ESP32 boards that I want to use as bluetooth proxies for my home assistant installation to cater for some bluetooth units I have like cheap thermometers and an Airthings Wave radon meter. I’ve used ESPHome Bluetooth Proxy to install.
My network setup is unfortunately problematic. I have an edgerouter connected to WAN. From the edgerouter I have two LAN ports, one going to my wired “stuff” like home assistant and nas and all that. The other lan port goes to a Google Nest mesh wifi that serves all wireless machines.
The problem I have is that the Google mesh router cannot be set in bridge mode. It just cannot while keeping the mesh functionality. So the ESP32 that connects via wifi is not reachable from home assistant because of the google router’s NAT.
I’m trying to evaluate my options:
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VPN? I’m running tailscale already, but I can’t seem to find that its possible to get that installed on the esphome.
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Port forwarding. Here I think I hit bugs in google home where I cannot find the esp32 under the port forwarding settings. And it’s not possible to add manual entries. I do find it under reserve ip -section and can reserve an IP for it but for some reason its just not possible to find under the port forward-section.
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new hardware. A new mesh system that allows bridge mode for the full wifi setup. At this point I’d rather not spend that money since I got the google mesh just a year ago, but hey, hardware is always fun.
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home assistant is running on kubernetes on a pi cluster that is currently only wired as described above. It would of course be possible to let the pi’s connect to wifi as well and let the container run bridged. I don’t know how home assistant deals with multiple network interfaces and if this is a feasable solution or not…? I’d definitely like to keep the wired setup as the default thing, but if it was possible to somehow setup the esphome integration to selectively use wifi…?
Is there any other way I might get my home assistant and esphome to talk to each other. My home assistant installation is in itself publicly reachable so if it was possible for esphome to init the connection…?