Easy and secure way for 'public' access?

Add-ons UIs
1

Hi all, I want to enable public access to 2 or 3 elements of my home automation. Just lights, not security or anything like that.

I want people to be able to go to a public site, without logging in and have the ability to control just those elements.

Ideally I don’t want to expose my home IP address - Prefer hosted somehow externally but has an ‘api’ link back to the system that only has the ability to control those few items.

Anyone have any ideas on how I might acheive that?

All of the items are MQTT aware so one option is to have an externally hosted page that can send MQTT commands. I can lock this down to web host IP etc but that is still a bit scary. Is there a better way?

2

Are you Apple based? If so, using HomeKit May work for this, as you could only exposed a couple of elements and they work in or out of your network.

3

Use cloudmqtt as your external mqtt. Give it the few topics that you want people to control
That way your own ip remains invisible and you expose what you want.

It has websocket suppport, so you can write simple webpage to control the topics

4

That might just work by using it as a bridge. I’ll give it a shot. Thanks!