I have searched a number of posts but can’t find a definitive answer so unfortunately I am going to have ot ask. Please don’t flame me if it has been asked before, I just couldn’t find it.
So, I have a raspberry pi 4 and want to install HA on it but I do NOT want it to be permanently connected to the LAN. Ideally, I want it tucked away in a cabinet with no LAN access and rely on WiFi to access/control it.
I have read a couple of posts which seem to suggest it’s possible but I’ve also seen that it is not recommended, without explanation why.
Initially, I just want to know if it’s possible, If it isn’t then I will have to look elsewhere as there is no LAN access anywhere near where I can place the PI .
Reliability is the reason why I wouldn’t recommend to use WiFi instead of LAN, of course it depends how far your cabinet is from the Access Point and the connection quality there.
DFS ( Dynamic frequency selection - Wikipedia ) is mandatory as far as I know in most parts of Europe and the US, your HA might become unavailable once in a while, it then depends how critical availabilty is to you and other services you might connect to Home Assistant.
WiFi on the Raspberry also might have interference from USB-connected devices
Putting it right next to your Access Point/Router and connect via cable might be a better choice.
Can you explain the usecase? Easier to understand what you are trying to accomplish then. If you isolate HA from everything else you will have severly limited functionality.
To be clear, when you say “LAN” do you mean “wired Ethernet”?
Your wi-fi devices are (typically) also on your LAN (local area network), which is the subnet defined by your router. My phone is on the same LAN as my HA installation, although the former is wireless and the latter is wired.
Having HA on the same network and connected by wifi is fine provided you have reliable wifi. Running it on a different network will be troublesome: if you don’t already know why, don’t do it.
Thanks for the response. My use case is that I can’t (don’t want to) have the raspberry pi sited next to my router. Ideally I wouldn’t have my router located where it is but it’s FTTP and they’ve put the ONT in a stupid place. Hence my requirement to put the PI somwhere else and use wifi, if possible.
I see. Like @Troon says, LAN is not limited to wired connections so easy to misunderstand what you are actually asking It is possible to run HA over wi-fi, but it is never recommended compared to wired connections.
Echoing everyone else that it’s definitely always going to be a better experience hard-wired to your network for a myriad of reasons. That said, any reason you can’t physically connect it to one of your mesh nodes at least?
Not sure if you ever managed to set this up, but can confirm it works well for my needs for my pi4 + wifi. I’m not doing anything complex though, maybe 30 zigbee devices, a few esps, a few bluetooth sensors and a tailscale node.
The way I did it was to physically attach an ethernet cable when installing and setting up for the first time. Once set up go to settings/system/network and add the wifi network. I don’t have easy physical access to the network, so have been running this on wifi for the past year without too many problems.
There have been a few times where it dropped off the network, and for whatever reason the fix was just reconnecting it to ethernet again. It’s definitely not ideal when that happens though.
It is possible to run HA over wi-fi, but it is never recommended compared to wired connections.