I have used HA for a few years now, but I just driving into ESP32 and ESPresense. this is what I am trying to do. I want to connect a ESP32 running ESPresense at my office to my HA at home. they are connected by a site to site VPN Meraki at the office and PFsense at home. At some point HA found the devise but it is unknown and unavailable. I do see it in mqtt Explorer but it is offline there as well. Any suggestions would be helpful.
ESPresense communications with HA using MQTT (TCP port 1883). As long as MQTT data can pass between your office and your home, this shouldn’t be an issue.
Could your VPN be configured to pass only specific data between your office and home? This seems like the most likely issue.
Here are some steps to help if the issue is MQTT-related or ESPresense-related:
Verify you have everything configured correctly by setting it up at home (because this is where your HA is located (or more specifically, where your MQTT server is located) – so, get your ESP32/ESPresense devices up and running and verified with MQTT Explorer. While the ESPresense is at your home (1) get the IP address of the ESPresense and (2) log into the ESPresense using a browser (you’ll repeat these 2 steps when you’re at the office, you’re just confirming these actions work).
Once they work at home, head to the office with your ESPresense and MQTT Explorer device.
(A) Start by looking for MQTT data with MQTT explorer at your office – based on your above comments, I suspect this will fail, confirming there’s an issue with the VPN passing MQTT data. From here, you may want to ask about passing MQTT data on a Meraki forum.
(B) Once you get MQTT explorer (at your office) to see data from HA (at your home), then power up the ESPresense device (at the office). Verify you can talk to the ESPresense device by repeating the steps from above – (1) get the IP address of the ESPresense (it must be different that the IP address it got at home) and (2) log into the ESPresense using a browser. You’ll need this part to work before MQTT will work.
At this point, you have verified that (A) MQTT traffic can pass between the office and home (using MQTT Explorer) and that (B) the ESPresense device is on the office network.
Hopefully, at this point it works. If not, there is a more complex issue going on.