One of the biggest benefits of Home Assistant is that it offers local control, so your smart home doesn't stop working when the internet is down.If you're away from home when the internet connection dies, however, then you may be unable to reach your Home Assistant server even if it's still working fine.These projects offer some alternative ways to communicate with your smart home without relying on the internet.
Call Home Assistant when the internet is down An M5Stack cellular module turns a phone call into a trigger Under normal circumstances, you can control Home Assistant remotely as long as you have a network connection, such as Wi-Fi or your phone's cellular connection.If you have a remote connection set up via Home Assistant Cloud, Tailscale, or some other method, you can monitor and control your smart home from wherever you are.If your home internet connection goes down, however, even if your phone is connected to Wi-Fi or a cellular network, you may not be able to communicate with your Home Assistant server.
A Home Assistant user came up with an ingenious solution.It uses an ESP32-based M5Stack CoreS3 SE combined with an M5Stack SIM800L cellular module and an M5GO Battery Bottom3.ESPHome runs on the device and can communicate with Home Assistant.
You can call or send an SMS to the device, and the caller and message are passed to Home Assistant, which can then trigger a script or automation.It uses a whitelist to ensure that only recognized numbers can trigger Home Assistant actions.Even if your home internet is down, as long as you have a phone signal, you can control your smart home remotely.
Related Offline Is the New Smart: Why Local Control Matters More Than Ever Have you tried turning AWS off and back on again? AWS' recent outage highlights the need for local control.Posts 3 By Patrick Campanale Use LoRa to reach Home Assistant without a cellular network Two Meshtastic radios let you control Home Assistant remotely Close A cellphone isn't the only way to control Home Assistant remotely without an internet connection.LoRa is a low-power radio technology designed to send small amounts of data over long distances.
Using the popular open-source Meshtastic protocol, it works as a mesh system, so messages can be passed from node to node, extending the range even further.One user created a system that uses two LilyGo T-Echo handheld radios running Meshtastic.One device stays at home, connected to a computer via USB, while the other is carried by the user.
A Python listener takes the incoming messages and passes them to Home Assistant via the REST API over the local network.Using their handheld radio, the user can control smart home devices from as far away as 3 km, without a Wi-Fi or cellular connection.One of the cleverest parts is that, since LoRa's low bandwidth isn't practical for sending images, the system uses a local AI vision model to analyze a security camera feed and send a short description of what it shows instead.
Let Home Assistant contact you via SMS An ESP32 and a modem can send messages without the internet The first two projects in this list send commands to Home Assistant without an internet connection, but you can apply the same principles in the opposite direction, too.If you have automations set up that can send you a notification if there's a water leak or the smoke alarm sounds, you don't want to miss those notifications just because the internet goes down.One user has created an updated version of an old ESPHome cellular project that uses an ESP32 connected to a SIM7600E-L1C 4G modem, with its own SIM and cellular connection.
This allows the ESP32 to send and receive SMS messages without using the internet.If an important notification needs to be delivered when the user is away from home and the internet is down, Home Assistant can use SMS as a fallback option.As long as the user has cell service, they will be alerted to what is going on in their smart home.
This updated project is more practical than projects that use the older SIM800L from the first project on this list, since the SIM7600 family supports LTE while the older modem relies on 2G, and many 2G networks are being shut down.If you're planning to recreate this project, make sure you choose a modem module compatible with the network you want to use.Local control isn't much use if you're not at home Being able to control your smart home devices without relying on the cloud is one of the biggest benefits of Home Assistant.
You can still control your smart home remotely, but many of the solutions require both your phone and your home server to have an internet connection.These projects give you other options that can work even if your router has exploded.
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