Home Assistant Site II ~ The Nest Is Also Now Off Of SmartThings And Online With HAOS And Other Stuff 07Nov26

While I skied and partied with Steve a bit while in Summit, my ulterior motive was to convert the Nest's extensive IoT network to be Home Assistant based as done @ Blodgett recently. I bought a similar rig for HAOS and added the same ZWave and Zigbee antennas/coordinators. I used a wired Cat5e line in the study to get my Nest HOAS system up in the upper study (the MBR is already full of wireless stuff for WiFi, Arlo, Acurite, and SmartThings). Soon ST will be mothballed; it's fate was sealed with Samsung's cavalier handling of my data.

Home Assistant Operating System (HAOS)... Once again I needed to add a number of integrations and applications to the core Home Assistant system in order to enable visibility and control over the sensors and switches I've added to the IoT network here. As @ Blodgett, Zigbee & Zwave are used for sensor/switch access, and Tailscale was added for secure network access anywhere. The bigger task was eliminating the ~40 sensors and switches from ST and authorizing them into HAOS. Especially with Zwave and a desire to use S2/3 security, one needs physical access to the sensors and switches but they are often hidden or stored away or require ladder access. Here's just the map for the Zwave stuff. Yeah, one node died in the process and I ordered a new one.

HAOS Automation... I won't repeat the level of details offered on the Blodgett conversion but the Nest was a bigger task in sensor recognition as well as automation "programming." Lights are going on/off everywhere based on motion; alerts are being sent to Kala & me on doors opening, smoke detected, spa temps falling, H2O boiler temps falling, etc. The "programming" is pretty simple if trigger-and-condition-then-action; the issue is really remembering to cover all the cases I had prior, plus some I added since in build-mode. It did go faster than last time, as I had built one of these things already @ Blodgett.

Tailscale Networking... I had built a Wireguard split-tunnel gateway for use in Summit so I could get Plex running on Roku and accessing the DVR content or even live feeds (like football games) from Blodgett securely. An enabler too was conversion to XFi for higher bandwidth services at both Blodgett and the Nest. It allowed me to cut $60/mo from my Hulu bill as I don't need cloud-based DVR OR "Live TV" local broadcast feeds anymore ~ I just get access to the Blodgett-based servers and receivers at the Nest now. Claude Code helped considerably with that finicky configuration (routes, certifications, eeech). But today I converted the whole notion to Tailscale and our secure tailnet. I dedicated an ArchLinux box to the effort and even removed Wireguard-based infrastructure from it. This conversion was also accelerated considerably by using Claude Code, and sometimes it's scary, but it is effective. I highly recommend both of these: Claude and Tailscale, the latter especially if you have multiple LANs to which you want secure access from each other and anywhere (phone/pad) really. Performance initially was poor and buffered on streams opened on Plex on Roku (~6Mbps) but determining the issue was CPU wait states and changing the CPU idle deep state settings on the gateway repaired that to 100Mbps! 

JRiver MC Access... I now also access a TB of music via the private tailnet on my phone/pad or on my Nest-side other clients ~ my client choice is JRiver MC but Matt prefers Plex. I used to synchronize a flash drive and bring my music library to Summit physically as the remote access scheme inherent with JRiver MC was too latent. Now track-to-track latency is acceptable and I don't need to think about when I last synchronize and with what.

Samsung Fired... The conversions are complete; access is all local (no cloud services); ST hubs are removed; I am in control. Well, I still have to eliminate Arlo & Acurite but those conversions are underway.