{"id":7057,"date":"2025-12-23T18:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-12-23T18:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.marshflattsfarm.org.uk\/wordpress\/?p=7057"},"modified":"2025-12-23T20:59:02","modified_gmt":"2025-12-23T20:59:02","slug":"temperature-and-humidity-monitoring-in-the-outbuildings-stage-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.marshflattsfarm.org.uk\/wordpress\/?p=7057","title":{"rendered":"Temperature and Humidity Monitoring in the Outbuildings \u2013 Stage 3"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.marshflattsfarm.org.uk\/wordpress\/?p=7013\" data-type=\"post\" data-id=\"7013\">An earlier Post<\/a>\u00a0outlined the plan to use IKEA TIMMERFLOTTE Temperature &amp; Humidity Sensors with a GL.iNet GL-S20 Thread Border Router in conjunction with Home Assistant, to monitor the environmental conditions in various parts of the Outbuildings &#8211; especially the unheated rooms which are open to the ambient conditions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I got the TIMMERFLOTTE devices on-boarded to Home Assistant fairly easily and they even noticed they had a firmware update available and downloaded and installed that over-the-air &#8211; all without needing any other IKEA-specific &#8216;hub&#8217; or similar devices. The on-boarding (&#8220;commissioning&#8221; in Matter terminology) requires a smartphone (iOS in my case) and makes use of some of the built-in Apple software to help the Home Assistant App handle the set-up. For that to work, the smartphone must (temporarily) connect to the same network subnet as both the Thread Border Router and Home Assistant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>While the devices worked fine when tested in the House, they were not working when moved to the Outbuildings &#8211; despite them being on the same network Subnet (which gets &#8216;stretched&#8217; to the Outbuildings &#8211; albeit via a few Ethernet Bridges and extra network hops). This was puzzling because everything was expected to work the same in both locations. It turned out to be a firewall issue, related to the use of an extra IPv6 address range: in the House the network traffic only has to traverse the network Switch to get from the Thread Border Router to Home Assistant (so it doesn&#8217;t reach the firewall) but with the Thread Border Router moved to the Outbuildings the traffic is traversing the inter-building link so hits the firewall to get to Home Assistant &#8211; even though it&#8217;s on the same Subnet. Three firewall rules turned out to be required:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Allow IPv6 UDP traffic with Source Port 5353 (i.e. mDNS)<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Allow IPv6 UDP traffic with Destination Port 5540 (i.e. Matter)<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Allow IPv6 ICMP traffic &#8211; to permit Home Assistant to &#8216;ping&#8217; the sensors for diagnostic purposes<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>It&#8217;s clear the Matter protocol expects a completely &#8216;flat&#8217; network topology &#8211; which isn&#8217;t great from a security or problem-solving standpoint. A decent compromise is to have a dedicated and largely isolated &#8216;flat&#8217; Subnet for Matter \/ Thread traffic &#8211; but to dual-home the Home Assistant server so it can also participate in Matter communications (while using its &#8216;other&#8217; network interface for all other communications).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An earlier Post\u00a0outlined the plan to use IKEA TIMMERFLOTTE Temperature &amp; Humidity Sensors with a GL.iNet GL-S20 Thread Border Router in conjunction with Home Assistant, to monitor the environmental conditions in various parts of the Outbuildings &#8211; especially the unheated &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.marshflattsfarm.org.uk\/wordpress\/?p=7057\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[111,14,94,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7057","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environmental-monitoring","category-home-automation","category-outbuildings","category-product-choices"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marshflattsfarm.org.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marshflattsfarm.org.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marshflattsfarm.org.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marshflattsfarm.org.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marshflattsfarm.org.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7057"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.marshflattsfarm.org.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7057\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7108,"href":"https:\/\/www.marshflattsfarm.org.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7057\/revisions\/7108"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marshflattsfarm.org.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marshflattsfarm.org.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marshflattsfarm.org.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}