Home Automation

All home-automation apps live in the home-automation namespace. Pods that need direct L2 access to IoT devices attach a secondary interface to VLAN 1152 (IOT) via Multus.


Applications

AppPurpose
Home AssistantCentral home automation hub
FrigateNVR / AI camera monitoring
ESPHomeESP8266/ESP32 device firmware management
Zigbee2MQTTZigbee coordinator → MQTT bridge
MosquittoMQTT broker
Matter ServerMatter/Thread protocol support
HomebridgeHomeKit bridge for non-native devices
Node-REDVisual automation flows

Network Architecture

Pods requiring IoT network access use a Multus NetworkAttachmentDefinition (iot in kube-system) to attach a secondary NIC on VLAN 1152. This allows:

  • Frigate to discover and stream RTSP/ONVIF cameras on the IOT subnet
  • Home Assistant to communicate directly with devices
  • Zigbee2MQTT to reach the Zigbee coordinator USB dongle (passed through to the pod)

The primary pod interface remains on the cluster overlay network (VLAN 1099).


Home Assistant

Central hub connecting all other automation apps. Integrations include Zigbee (via Zigbee2MQTT + MQTT), ESPHome devices, Frigate (via MQTT + API), Matter devices, and Homebridge.


Frigate

AI-based NVR. Runs on the talos-gpu-01 node for hardware-accelerated object detection via the Intel Arc A380 GPU (VAAPI).


Mosquitto

MQTT broker used by Zigbee2MQTT, Frigate, ESPHome, and Home Assistant as the messaging backbone.


Zigbee2MQTT

Bridges Zigbee devices to MQTT. Requires a USB Zigbee coordinator passed through to the pod.


Node-RED

Visual flow editor for automation logic. Runs as a companion to Home Assistant for complex automations.