Hello everyone! 
I wanted to share my recent journey of migrating from SmartThings to Home Assistant, which has been both exciting and a bit challenging. As someone who values local control and minimal reliance on the cloud, HA seemed like the perfect fit for me. However, I encountered a few hurdles along the way that I thought might be worth discussing with the community.
Initially, setting up HA on my Raspberry Pi 4B was a breeze. I quickly got it running and even configured DuckDNS for external access. But here’s where things got tricky: after setting up DuckDNS, I found that I couldn’t connect to HA from my local network anymore. I did some research and discovered that others had similar issues, suggesting that DuckDNS should be used even on the local network. I gave that a shot, but it still didn’t resolve the problem completely.
Then, we had a power outage, and my modem went down. Despite the rest of my network being on a UPS, I couldn’t control anything because DuckDNS wasn’t reachable without the modem. This brought me back to my initial confusion: how am I supposed to access HA when I’m at home and the internet is down? I remember reading that using the internal IP with HTTPS might work, but when I tried https://10.0.X.XXX/, it didn’t connect. Is this supposed to work, or am I missing something?
To add to the mix, I recently switched ISPs, and their modem doesn’t support bridge mode. This has led to a double-NAT situation, making it even harder to reach HA through DuckDNS. I’m hoping that if I can sort out the local connection issue, the double-NAT problem might become more manageable.
On a more positive note, I’ve been impressed with HA’s flexibility and the active community support. It’s been a great learning experience, and I’m excited to continue exploring all the possibilities it offers. If anyone has tips or tricks for resolving these connection issues, I’d be more than grateful to hear them!
Cheers, and happy automating! 