I own a Home Assistant Green and subscribe to Home Assistant Cloud/Nabu Casa.
My goal is simple: use Home Assistant as the central hub for one dashboard showing status and, where supported, direct control for thermostats, cameras, shades, media, locks, garages, irrigation, and security status across multiple homes.
We previously had working Home Assistant-based Ring live view and direct thermostat control, but later changes to our frontend/authentication approach broke those capabilities. I want to make sure we are using Home Assistant and Nabu Casa the intended way rather than building unnecessary workarounds.
Specifically, what is the recommended supported architecture for:
remote control of writable climate entities from a custom frontend
Ring live video/WebRTC through Home Assistant
Blink snapshots
secure remote access to Home Assistant entities through Nabu Casa
durable authentication for a trusted personal frontend without repeated expiring sessions
using Home Assistant as the central status/automation layer while keeping vendor apps only as fallback
We want Home Assistant itself to be the integration hub, not merely a launcher back to Google Home, Ring, Blink, MyQ, and other native apps.
Can you point us to the recommended Home Assistant/Nabu Casa approach and any current limitations?
Certainly. Your goals are similar to most users looking for home automation solutions. They are achievable - HomeAssistant is very flexible and is ever evolving in capability. What capabilities aren’t in the official apps and integrations are often in user developed apps available through HACS. I recommend you install that and have a browse for yourself.
All your questions are answered in the official documentation. Best go there first, rather than risk misleading and outdated search results from AI and LLMs.
We’re probably not going to do searches for you as that is an important skill you should robustly develop yourself, avoiding outdated information often served up by AI bots, but you are welcome to raise specific questions for specific issues, and if you clearly document them, then you will probably get specific solutions. You have a paid Nabu Casa subscription which includes support, so that is where your initial queries should go.
Most beginner questions have already been asked and resolved in the support area at Nabu Casa and also in these forums. Both have search capabilities for self help.
Remember that support here in these forums and most third party open source solutions are done by volunteers, of varying skills and experience - some of whom may know less than you and others that have extensive experience. Trust, but verify. The better the quality of your problem description, the faster and better quality the solutions will be identified. You learn the most when you fix things that are broken.
Newbie recommendations.
Verify what you are doing - just don’t try everything without considering the consequences.
Always read the release notes before updating.
Make regular backups so you can go back if you made a blunder.
AI won’t solve your problem - it is a tool that will offer what it has found on the internet, the same place you already exist yourself. Garbage in - garbage out. Beware: it often gets it wrong, especially in the fast paced overchanging ecosystem like HomeAssistant that has daily, weekly and monthly changes.
When posting logs and code in the forums, use </> formatting for readability. Make life easy for us.