Proxy all the things: no device left behind – Open Home Foundation
Discover how Open Home Foundation projects can help you give your beloved old devices a new lease of life for a more sustainable smart home.
Every smart home has them: the older devices that still work perfectly well but no longer fit neatly into a modern setup. Instead of letting them gather dust in a drawer, the Open Home Foundation’s projects can help you bring them back into the fold.
The short version
- Here’s how a little proxying can give your beloved old gear a new lease of life, and keep your smart home that bit more sustainable.
- Discover how Open Home Foundation projects can help you give your beloved old devices a new lease of life for a more sustainable smart home.
- At the Open Home Foundation, we believe the most sustainable device is the one you already own.
- You shouldn’t be forced to abandon devices that work – and that you love – just because the manufacturer hasn’t made them “smart”.
Context
That’s why recent releases of Home Assistant and ESPHome focus on helping you bridge the gap between older, offline protocols and the modern smart home. This makes it possible for you to pull almost any device into your setup – yes, even that 20-year-old receiver, or basement air conditioner with yellowing plastic remote! If you missed this in the Home Assistant release notes, here’s a summary. We’ve expanded the capabilities of ESPHome – the software that powers many of our DIY hardware projects – to support generic proxying.
Why it matters
This allows Home Assistant to use small, inexpensive microcontrollers as physical bridges for: These join our existing Bluetooth and Z-Wave proxies to ensure that no matter what language your device speaks, you can reach it over your home network. I like to think of a proxy as a communication bridge. When acting as a proxy, a device handles a certain type of communication for Home Assistant.
Summary by Nerd News Network. Read the full original at Home Assistant Blog via the source link.