Connect Home Assistant to devices at home

Home Assistant on blitz.cloud can control devices on your home network once your home network is connected and each device is forwarded to it under a name, such as hue-bridge. You need a small Linux machine at home that stays on, like a Raspberry Pi. Your router stays closed, so this works behind carrier-grade NAT and DS-Lite as well.

What you need

• Home Assistant installed from the App Store.
• A Linux machine on your home network that runs all the time: a Raspberry Pi, a home server, or the box Home Assistant ran on before. It connects your home network to blitz.cloud.
• Your home network's range. On a FRITZ!Box it's usually 192.168.178.0/24, on many other routers 192.168.0.0/24 or 192.168.1.0/24. Your router's network settings show it.

1. Connect the hosted network

Open Private network in the dashboard and connect the WireGuard app card, if you haven't already. This is the WireGuard network blitz.cloud runs for you, described in private networks. If you already use Tailscale or your own WireGuard, you can use that network instead and skip to step 4 for devices that are on it directly.

2. Add the home machine as a device

1. On the WireGuard card, click Add a device and name it, for example home.
2. Enter your home network's range, such as 192.168.178.0/24, as the range this device carries.
3. Download the config file. The key in it is shown once and we don't keep it, so save the file now.

3. Set up the home machine

On the Linux machine, install WireGuard and start the config as a service. With the file saved as home.conf, on Debian, Ubuntu or Raspberry Pi OS:

sudo apt install wireguard
sudo cp home.conf /etc/wireguard/blitz.conf
sudo systemctl enable --now wg-quick@blitz

The dashboard shows a few more lines under the config that let the machine pass traffic on to the other devices on your network. Run those as well. A moment later the machine shows as online on the Designer page.

The machine connects out to blitz.cloud, so there's nothing to set up on your router.

4. Find the device

Open Designer in the dashboard, select your network and click Scan my network. The scan checks your home range for the ports devices like a Hue Bridge, a NAS, a camera or an MQTT broker use and lists what answers, with the title of its web page where there is one. It runs only when you click.

A device the scan doesn't find can be added by hand on the canvas with its address, for example 192.168.178.20.

5. Connect Home Assistant to the device

1. On the canvas, draw a line from Home Assistant to the device.
2. Give the connection a name. Home Assistant will reach the device under this name, so keep it short: hue-bridge, shelly-kitchen, mqtt.
3. Choose the ports and whether each is TCP or UDP. Common ones:

Save. The connection is ready a few seconds later. Only Home Assistant can use it; your other apps can't reach the device unless you draw a line from them too.

6. Add the device in Home Assistant

Home Assistant normally finds devices on its own by listening for broadcasts on the local network. Those don't travel through the tunnel, so you add each integration by hand:

1. In Home Assistant, open Settings, Devices & services, and click Add integration.
2. Pick the integration, for example Philips Hue.
3. Where it asks for a host or IP address, enter the name from step 5: hue-bridge. For ESPHome and MQTT, also enter the port.

For the Hue Bridge, press the button on the bridge when Home Assistant asks. Your lights then appear as usual.

Limits

Home Assistant runs its automations only while it's awake. On the free plan an app sleeps after 30 minutes without visitors, so automations that should run around the clock need Home Assistant kept awake, on Pro or by making it a Pro app.

Questions

Why doesn't Home Assistant discover my devices by itself?

Discovery uses mDNS and similar broadcasts that only travel inside your home network. Home Assistant on blitz.cloud reaches a device through its forward, under the name you gave it, so you enter that name when you add the integration.

Home Assistant can't connect to the device. What should I check?

Check that the home machine shows as online on the Designer page, that the forward has the port the integration uses, and that the device answers at its address from another device at home. A device that changed its address needs the new one entered on the canvas; giving it a fixed address in your router avoids that.

Do I need to open a port on my router?

No. The home machine connects out to blitz.cloud, and everything goes through that connection.