Tor operator here.

If you don’t have a second IP for your relay, don’t host at home. You will have CAPTCHAs everywhere, many sites will block you and your ISP will eventually contact you to stop degrading their IP space reputation.

Most website owners don’t discriminate between Tor exits and relays. They subscribe to block-lists that include all known Tor IP addresses. Major online services will make your browsing experience really shitty and once you’re a “known Tor IP” it will take months to remove that reputation.

You can run a Bridge instead, but you will eventually have the same problem.

I use Shelly EMs and EM Pros and they are excellent. My favourite feature is that they work on non-networked firewalled VLANs and don’t need the internet to work.

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I’ve got two of the Screek 2A sensors and think they’re good. Mmwave technology isn’t a magic bullet that automatically works every time, like all radio tech there are some limitations.

I use one to turn on a light in a hallway and the other to detect when someone approaches the front door and issue an alert via ntfy.sh. Once in a while it misses some motion, so I’d probably not recommend it if you were building a human life kind of scenario, but they’re fine for me.

More importantly, they’re well supported by HA/ESPHome, open source, inexpensive and compact.

how do you typically notice the filter needs to be changed now? does it:

• draw more power than usual? wattage sensor
• give some alert like a “change filter” light? esp32
• need changing after a certain time/usage amount? power consumption sensor
• need changing every X days? you might just need a calendar alert

of course the mega nerd approach would be to put a particulate sensor in the duct like a PMS7003 that measures PM10 particles like dust, strap on an esp32 and set some alerts using your favourite monitoring tool.

You can always use the Home Assistant API to create your own UI experience. I create small HA touch panels using M5Stack Core2 devices this way.

I would do this with a home-made esphome (like other have suggested). If it has to be a commercial product, you can buy the shelly addon and attach it to any of their Z-wave 1pm products like this one for example.

The addon supports up to four temperature probes and the cables can be many metres long.

Can confirm times are hard. I work at a tech company and every role in engineering gets >100 applications the day it goes live.

My advice - go to events hosted by those companies, get to know the people who work there and find ways to help them. Then get them to refer you for roles.

Twingate is another option if it’s just device to device networking and you trust all the devices that are in your network. It’s free for personal use and peer to peer so no issues with TOS if you’re streaming.

If you’re using OPNsense I recommend you install and enable Avahi to help route discovery traffic, and I would double check multicast is functioning on your wifi.

IIRC with home assistant there are some commands you can run to make it aware of your VLANs… have a look at this

+1 for shelly, a few options that could work.

is multicast DNS enabled and available in that VLAN?

have you set up the network for HA using the

ha network 

commands?

have a look at the Shelly H&T (and the new G3 version). They are cost effective battery or mains powered temperature sensors that include both bluetooth and wifi. They work locally with no hub required but can also report to the cloud where alerting can be configured.

definitely run two cables for each point. nothing beats having a cable be broken somewhere in the walls with no way to repair it.

You can get that kind of power through a Cat6a or Cat7 ethernet cable but a lower spec cable won’t work. here’s an article that talks about the limitations https://sixtytrend.com/can-cat5e-do-poe/

You get a qualified tradesperson to wire it properly into your electrical distribution.

me typing “sudo !!” instead of rewriting the shell command undoes this.

I’m using PoE Extractors to run some regular 12vdc stuff using existing ethernet cabling.

A couple of points to note:

• network switches won’t turn on power by default unless the receiving device asks for it using the right protocols, so you need to inject the power using the corresponding PoE injector at the other end of the cable. you can’t just snip the end off a RJ45 and wire it into things.
• Cat cable won’t take high currents, be sure to stick within the allowed range for the cable or it will melt and maybe bust your device
• there is a voltage drop over distance, be sure to calculate if you need to change your transformer as 12vdc could become 9 or lower by the time it gets to your device
• there are some really poor quality PoE injectors/extractors.
• running mains cable and having a transformer nearer the device might be simpler and cheaper in the long run.

the cat should be allowed to make their own mistakes

can you ping one of the IoT devices from the HA device on that new NIC?

can you manually add a device and HA see it/add it normally?

is there a firewall routing between HA and the IoT devices that might be blocking discovery somehow?