I would like to integrate Hue lights at a holiday flat into my regular home HA set-up. HA is not running in the holiday flat, but I’ve already got some devices from there integrated into my regular home HA set-up, such as an Arlo camera. Those integrations tie into a cloud service.
There is a Hue bridge and several lights at the holiday flat. Is there a way to integrate those into HA over the internet? I’m wondering, for example, if I could use a service such as DuckDNS at the flat to create a static URL and then use that URL instead of a local IP address in the Hue configuration settings.
I’m away from the flat and so can’t experiment now, but I’d like to be prepared for when I’m next there.
@sjee I’ve used VPNs from time to time but am no expert. Do you mean a VPN between the two gateways/routers (covering all traffic in/out of both locations, I guess) or between the server hosting HA at my regular home and something (the router maybe?) at my holiday flat? I’d be a bit concerned about slowing all traffic down with a VPN, but I’m not sure if that is a valid concern.
If I’m being greedy, can you think of any simple way to get the on/off status of Hue lights over the net? I see that I can’t get status with IFTTT. That’s not a deal breaker. I can just set on/off toggles through IFTTT if not.
Hmmm, one way could be to use an input boolean to set the state to on or off.
When the lights are turned on, the boolean is set to on. When turned of the boolean is set to off.
Not pretty but should work.
@ronschaeffer
Hi, I’m planning to do the same thing as you originally described. Could you please tell me which way you finally decided to go? VPN or IFTTT? Or maybe even some third idea?
Thanks a lot in advance!
Hi there. Sorry for the delay in replying. In the interim, I set up a Pi at the remote flat running HA and rely on Remote Home Assistant to make the lights available locally. I lived with IFTTT for awhile but it was flakey. I’m running a Tailscale on the remote Pi to make access simple.
