Looking for a new router that allow me to use HAs full potential

Hardware
1

Scroll down to skip to the hardware question - Context of what I want to achieve:
Hello, I’ve been messing around with Home Assistant for a few months now, and my final conclusion is that I don’t find very useful until I unlock its full potential. I find it absolute key essential that it can push notifications to my phone with callback functions. Without that functionality I don’t think I will ever consider my home as “smart”.

eg. I want to be notified when I have left the house and some lights are still turned on with a notification on my android phone something like:

“No one is home, lights are still on. Want me to turn it off?”
[turn off] [keep on]

or

“your alarm have been triggered by [name of sensor]. Want me to turn it off?”
[turn off] [do nothing] [call police]

etc…

In order to do so, I need my phone to geo fence communicate with HA, I also need HAs automation to be able to fire notifications to devices that are not on currently on the wifi, I need those devices to respond to those notification with a wanted action/automation for HA to perform.

It turns out… I can’t make that happen with current available solutions combined with my current router.
In order to connect my phone to my rasbperry pi hassio instance I need to expose it to outside my wifi, and I have tried to follow a few guides, some saying that I need to enable lets encrypt before enabling duckdns, others saying “if you are using duckdns don’t enable lets encrypt as duckdns already ships with it” quoted: addons/letsencrypt/README.md at master · home-assistant/addons · GitHub

almost everything I read tells me to fix an local ip address for my raspberry pi and my current router does not allow me to… I’m pretty sure that I am stuck here due to the limitatinos of my router

Current router: Huawei E5180s-22 Huawei E5180 4G LTE CUBE Router | Huawei E5180s-22 E5186s-610 4G LTE WiFi Router

Actual Hardware question
I am looking for a new router that does it all and does not cost a fortune. My connection is 4G (sim card) as i pay 1/4 compared to lunatic priced wired broad band connection. I am not looking for some high end counter strike router, I am looking for a router that does not lack configuration ability.

  • most important: good documentation / how to configure guides
  • I want to continue being able to put a sim card in my router and be online.
  • I want the router to support all obvious features needed when messing around with home tech.
  • I want the router to have decent speed and decent range.
  • I want the router to co cost no more than 120$
  • connect devices with eth cable - and allow configuration of such connected devices (my current router does not)
  • connect devices over wifi b/g/n as minimum, and allow configuration of such connected devices

Which routers are you using, and what features do you like about it? Have you ever felt limited due to the features your router provides? Please advice in my search of a new router :slight_smile:

2

Best experience would be to put your Huawei router in bridge mode and put a router behind your huawei device.

I’d recommend you to look for a router that supports OpenWRT fully. Only then you’ll be able to do everything you could ever imagine :stuck_out_tongue:

https://openwrt.org/

1 Like
3

Using a fixed ip on a linux system doesnt have anything to do with the limitations of your router. (Yes you can use a reserved ip for your System that you defined in your Router)
BUT…
a simple
/etc/dhcpcd.conf

auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet static
    address 192.168.100.10
    netmask 255.255.255.0
    gateway 192.168.100.1
    wpa-roam /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

should be easy enough.

4

Assuming they aren’t using HassOS.

5

@Vasco Thanks for the tip. And openwrt is somewhat easy? or at least well documented? Really trying to find a solution that doesn’t require reading a whole lot of books. The less time spent on setting up stuff the better :wink:

@Jan.Schmidt Oh, right I think I know what you are talking about, the devices requests its own ip address instead of the router identifying the device by its mac address and then assigning a fixed ip? eh?
But what if another device is using the ip addres that my rasperry pi is requesting? I would still have to somehow reserve it no?

Also. since i’m using ethernet cable, wouldn’t the config have to look something like this???:

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
    address 192.168.100.10 
    netmask 255.255.255.0
    gateway 192.168.100.1
    wpa-roam /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

@flamingm0e I am using HassOS, so configuring this file will not work? That’s how I interpret your message. Do you know what I could do instead?

6

No. The device doesn’t request an IP. A static IP on the device is just that. A static IP on the device. DHCP is not involved at all in that regard.

You don’t give it an IP address within the same DHCP SCOPE as the rest of your network.

Correct. There are very specific instructions on giving HassOS a static IP.

Give the device a static IP, but use the correct method assigned for HassOS specifically.

7

Its very essy. Actually just a few steps to flash a router with openwrt firmware. Just pick a router from the compatibility list and one that suits your needs as well ( wifi ramge, speeds, 100 mbit or 1000 mbit?) etc. Youtube is a very useful source to see what the steps are. You’ll see its very easy.

8

yapp but there was no clue about that.
mea culpa i just read the “manual” from that device… ohh it seems that thing didnt support nothing other than very minimalistic features. No pool size no nothing at all ;-(

BUT - a allinone device aka Router mostly start from the bottom of the pool - so using a static Adress thats the very last like 192.168.x.254 shouldnt be a problem.

sorry cant help because i am using a really hardcore device from draytek > 400 €
But using something with 16 mb flash that is supported by Openwrt is always a good idea.

cheers
.