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.
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.
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