I’m wanting to use a fingerprint sensor installed in my car to open and close my garage door. Said fingerprint sensor will be connected to an ESP32 running ESPhome. My home network will not be in range but I can get internet to the ESP32 using my phone’s hotspot.
Any ideas, how can I get the ESPhome to connect to home assistant when it’s not on the same network?
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Your best bet would likely be an internet-reachable MQTT broker on which ESPHome will publish and HA will subscribe
The easiest way: make your phone’s hotspot setup the same as your home network
This may not fit your use case, but have you considered using an NFC tag and the finger print reader or lock on your phone? Seems like it would be just as secure and a lot more stable.
Thank you for the suggestion. I had looked into doing a publicly accessibly MQTT broker about a year and a half ago when I first tried to setup the fingerprint scanner. Unfortunately I couldn’t get it working. At that time I don’t think that you could have more than one MQTT broker in HA and I didn’t like the idea of all my MQTT data going out so I pretty quickly abandoned the idea. Looking into it again now it looks like this is possible using MQTT bridge. I have no idea how to set this up but am going to look into it again.
For the past few years I have been using an NFC tag stuck in my car that I scan with my phone to open/close the garage door. This works really well. My reason for trying to go the fingerprint scanner route is ease/convenience. I know it sounds maybe dumb or lazy but sometimes getting to my phone (while driving) and unlocking my phone to scan the tag can be cumbersome. Especially if I forgot to take my phone out of my pocket before getting into my vehicle.
I also found this article Use Nabu Casa URL to use HA API but from what I remember I couldn’t get it working. I’m going to try it again though. Maybe growing a year…wiser?..since I last tried will help. HA!
It would be really sweet if ESPhome natively built in the ability to use an external URL to connect to HA.
Do you have your code?
I just tried mine again via NabuCase and it’s still working with the latest version of HA.
DM me if you like and we’ll get it working.
And then there is this option …
… which is used for your case here …
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Thank you for suggesting this! I will look into this option as well.