ESP Easy remote admin panel

[Misiu]

Hi there,
I'm relatively new to ESP Easy, but from the start, I like the project very much and I use it more and more.

I've set up Home Assistant at my parent's house, I use it to monitor and control the temperature in their house. To measure the temperature I'm using Wemos D1 + DS18B20 + ESP Easy. I'm connecting to HA via MQTT.
I had a need to change the configuration of all the units in my parent's house (change the resolution of DS18B20 sensors).
I had two options: travel 100 km or instruct my father how to start Team Viewer (which took longer that traveling ).

My idea is to create an addon for HA that will allow me to remotely configure ESP Easy.
I have access to Home Assistant via their cloud, so I can access the system in my parent's house from my PC, so the last thing missing is the ability to display ESP Easy UI inside Home Assistant and configure ESP Easy from HA.
I'm not sure if this is currently possible (use website or another unit to control another unit) but I see a lot of benefits.
I'm also not sure how this will behave in a situation where I configure Home Assistant via their cloud - all the commands must be proxy from cloud to local ESP Easy unit.

What do You guys think about such a solution? Are there any changes that are needed in ESP Easy to support such a scenario? Anyone else would find this useful?

[dynamicdave]

Sounds like a nice job for a Virtual Private Network (VPN).

Although there are some free offerings available, you could consider using a Raspberry Pi (even an inexpensive RPi-Zero-W would work) and installing PiVPN on it.
It would also mean that your parents don't reveal their internal IP address to the world.
I recently used one of my old Raspberry Pi(es) to try out PiVPN - pretty easy installation.
I then installed the free version of OpenVPN on my mobile phone and tablet.
When I use OpenVPN it drops me into my home network, so I can type in an URL (say for my Wemos D1 Mini and alter the settings).

I have no experience of HA as I use Node-RED running on a RPi-4B to control my home.

Hope this helps.

[Wiki]

As dynamicdave already posted, the installation of VPN is the best (and in my opinion the only) way for remotly connecting to the ESP devices. Have a look into the router of your parents, it may be able to provide a VPN tunnel. E.g. Fritz boxes do so.

Never ever expose the ESPs to the internet.

[uxhamby]

I use SoftEther as my VPN. It looks daunting but it isn't really. Works very well for me.