> My aim was to configure my home's heating to switch off when my family is away and turn back on when we return. This is achieved with home assistant, a popula

> My aim was to configure my home's heating to switch off when my family is away and turn back on when we return. This is achieved with home assistant, a popular open-source home automation platform, with location/presence notifications from mobile devices. To do this, the home assistant server needs to be accessible from the internet, as mobile devices must communicate with it remotely. Does it really need to be accessible from the internet? I've never used Home Assistant so maybe what follows would not work, but how about: • Your mobile device could upload the location/presence notifications to a server outside of your LAN, such as virtual machine at an inexpensive hosting service like Hetzner or Amazon Lightsail. Something on your LAN could poll that and talk to the Home Assistant server. • Your mobile device could email the notifications to you. Something on your LAN could monitor your email and process the notifications. A good tool for that is imapfilter [1]. [1] https://github.com/lefcha/imapfilter https://github.com/lefcha/imapfilter