AirGradient Forum

Easy way to disable outbound communication to Airgradient Servers (but allow local HA integration to function)

#1

I had inquired about this before (about 9 months ago but, the fixes or ability had mixed opinions, and appeared to be only configurable at the time of wifi setup (with some confusion about this as well), or manually compiling.

At this point, with the firmware version 3.3.9 is there an easy option to disable communication to external airgradient servers, but allowing local to Home Assistant?

My indoor monitors do not need to communicate with airgradient servers. All the data I need to can be obtained from my Home Assistant integration. It would be nice to be able to “manually upgrade” firmware, should that be necessary.

#2

In the local API documentation arduino/docs/local-server.md at master · airgradienthq/arduino · GitHub it looks like you can set postDataToAirGradient to false which should let it be connected to your local network but not attempt to send to the AirGradient Dashboard. You would need to set that with an API call yourself as it isn’t an option in the HA Integration at this time.
Also make sure to set your Configuration Control to Local in HA, although it probably already is
image

For manual firmware updates, you can do it from this page:

But it isn’t immediately updated, so there are newer versions in the Github page that aren’t pushed by the AirGradient Dashboard or on that firmware page at this time.

#3

Thank you for the quick reply.

So, the disabling of outbound communication, but allowing local to HA requires a configuration modification to the source code and recompiling.

Setting up and maintaining an Arduino IDE environment is a bit of a hassle for me, so I need to weigh if I should just shut down my three indoor monitors as they they complain too often about server side issues, and it is distracting. I don’t want to waste airgradient server resources, if I never use the dashboard as well.

#4

No, you don’t need to make any code changes, but you do need to make an API call to each device, using something like Curl or Postman.

If you are new to APIs, there are some examples in that link I gave, but basically you are sending a web request to the device that tells it to change its running configuration. It isn’t a user friendly way to do it, but it can be done.

I wouldn’t give up on the devices over it.

#5

Thanks for the input.

I just found this setting in H.A. It appears to turn off data to airgradient. Just testing it.

airgradient1

#6

I see now. Many options only show up once you change to the Local configuration source. Since I had Cloud, I didn’t see them.

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