> I just wish there were more wired product options out there. Love to hear recommendations.

RS485 + Modbus

There are some hardlimits (like length, number of devices though)

Being in Europe, I would assume 868 Mhz. And the data rate depends on SF (spreading factor) used. https://docs.exploratory.engineering/lora/dr_sf/

LoRa is.. But LoRaWAN is an open standard, governed by LoRa Alliance.

Using the LoRa PHY. Not much of an open standard at that point....

So, in the article, I saw the picture of a ‘base station’...where can I find more info about the towers (locations, hardware)?

Does a single company own/control all the towers?

Are you speaking about the gateway? If so you can have more info here:

https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/docs/gateways/

These base stations (we call them gateways) are owned and operated by individuals, communities or companies. The gateways demodulate transmissions and forward them to The Things Network's public community network.

There are currently over 8000 of these gateways worldwide (see also the map on https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/map).

What is the incentive for a hobbyist to set up and maintain a gateway, given that the protocol is not open?

Most probably don't want to have a say in the protocol specifications, they just want to use the protocol and spectrum.

Same here. Use it to build tools targeting arm architecture (rpi, etc) on a x86_64 machine, that too in docker.

My experience is that building for ARMv7 is relatively quick, but ARMv6/armhf is MUCH slower. I have no idea why, really.

Will be trying ARM64 soon, as soon as I have a suitable development board.

Have been using https://www.home-assistant.io/components/emulated_hue/ for sometime. It does not use HA Cloud though (not required actually). With this, all the components registered in HA are emulated as hue devices for Alexa.

Note: I use Echo Plus, which has the abilities to discover devices. Not sure if this works with Echo or Dot.

Thanks. I'll have to look into that. Might not work for my use-case (AC units).

You can always leverage existing MQTT based components https://www.home-assistant.io/components/mqtt/, by making your component MQTT compatible.

Adding new component is also relatively straight forward. For ex, have a look at https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/blob/dev/ho... and other components. You implement couple of methods of existing traits, in this case, SwitchDevice.

Plug: If adhoc peer to peer port forwarding is what required, try https://github.com/selvakn/p2p-port-forward (which uses zerotier-sdk)

if you want a dedicated peer to peer vpn, zerotier.com is great.

Plug: If you want adhoc peer to peer port forwarding, you can try https://github.com/selvakn/p2p-port-forward (which uses zerotier-sdk)

Thank you will try :)

Plug: https://github.com/thoughtworks/talisman

Plug: https://github.com/selvakn/p2p-port-forward Based on https://www.zerotier.com/