Prototype Demonstration: Connecting Remote ESPHome Nodes to Home Assistant

I’m working on building a “Micro VPN” – a VPN service designed to seamlessly connect remote ESPHome microcontrollers to Home Assistant.

If you ever deployed an ESPHome node outside of your local network and still wanted it to talk to your smart home, you may have struggled with setting up Wireguard, dynamic DNS, etc. The goal with my Micro VPN is to simplify this process and make it as easy as possible to connect remote ESPHome nodes back home to your Home Assistant.

Curious? Checkout my prototype demonstration video.

Want to try it out? Sign up for the waitlist. I will start inviting people for a closed alpha soon!

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Not very open of you. Will this be open source?

The alpha/early access will be closed so I can carefully manage how many users and devices I let on the platform.

Each user and connected device will be using bandwidth and compute resources which I will have to be paying for. Providing unlimited access at that point is simply economically not possible.

Once the platform reaches a sufficient stability and maturity I will be opening it up in an open beta, but note that I won’t be able to offer this as a free service. Unless we can find a sponsor that will provide compute and bandwidth.

I am a big fan of and long time contributor to open source (checkout my GitHub), am heavily using open source in building this (e.g. Wireguard, node.js, Redis/ValKey, Docker, etc) and have already open sourced and documented parts of the work related to this project (e.g. shmock, tesht, design-system-builder and documentation on how to setup Playwright tests in a Docker container.

I intend on open sourcing and documenting more in the future. Certainly follow along if you are interested in this aspect.

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