I’ve been eagerly looking forward to the time when I can replay my Echo Dots with a self-hosted solution, but so far I haven’t found hardware that I really liked the look and style of.

Yeah I always use states when I can but the original post description made it sound like the integration was directly sending a notification. If it didn’t set a state (which would be weird) then you’d need an event.

https://www.home-assistant.io/docs/configuration/events/

In the dev tools > events tab you can subscribe and see what events are sent. There should be an event that is sent when it sends a notification. Create an automation that listens for that event

One of the problems with the cloud-polling integrations is that they will frequently poll the back-end APIs to get the current status of that device. A normal user might only open up the app once or twice a day and call the APIs, but these integrations will go 24/7 every 10s-5m. That can add up to a non-trivial amount of traffic. If there’s 100 users opening it up once a day, that’s not a lot of traffic, but 10 users polling every 1 minute is equivalent to 15k people doing something once a day.

I actually saw one of my integrations I used defaulted to updating every 10 seconds. I decreased that because I didn’t want to draw attention to it.

A business will look at their usage and ask why there’s more than expected traffic. They could be running their server on a potato. They could go back and support Matter, that costs money, requires skilled engineers, and cuts into profit margins.

While it sucks, that is something they could point to in a court about “economic harm”.

Also, the law requires that publicly traded companies be greedy

The law doesn’t actually state you need screw over your customers and maximize profit. It says that executives have a fiduciary duty, which means they must act in the best interest of the shareholder, not themselves.

That does not mean they have to suck out every single dollar of profit. Executives have some leeway in this and can very easily explain that napkins lead to happier customers and longer term retention which means long term profits.

It’s purely a short-term, wall street driven, behavior also driven by executive pay being also based in stock so they’re incentivized to drive up the price over the next quarter so they can cash out.

It just updated on my phone to the new icon. I tried to give it a chance but wow that looks not great. Something about the scale and lack of discerning features.

Will I still need to consider multicast DNS if my DNS server is on-prem (Pi-Hole + Unbound)

Multicast DNS is separate from DNS, so even if you have Pi-Hole, you’d still have devices using mDNS. It’s possible to route mDNS across separate IP networks seeing as how there’s mDNS relays across VLANs which would suggest Wireguard could support Multicast. Other things use Broadcast (e.g. WoL) which is a bit more challenging to forward across IP networks.

I’m not familiar with GRE so I couldn’t comment on whether it’s possible or not. I guess it all depends on how confident you are with your networking skills. If you get it working, you should definitely document it and share with others.

I didn’t quite do what you did, but I ran HA in a Kubernetes cluster which was logically a separate IP network. I had to setup the container with multiple network interfaces and specially craft the route table to forward broadcasts + multicast traffic to the correct network.

Tailnet appears to be Tailscale which is Wireguard underneath. This means it operates at layer 3 (IP). However a bunch of smart home stuff (mDNS, WoL, etc) all depend on layer 2 connectivity (same subnet).

That means some stuff won’t work correctly.

Mine was flashing my Emporia Vue2 home energy monitoring system with ESPHome

I’m always interested in sensors (got a bunch of home made Air Quality and CO2 sensors) so seeing real time energy was cool.

With the per circuit sensing I’m experimenting with identifying if my fridge is left open, or identifying when my clothes washer is finished.

Keepass2Android. I store everything in a KeePass database synced with OneDrive. I like KeePass because it serves as the storage for all my passwords, OTP, and even SSH keys because it can act as an SSH KeyAgent.