HomeRecall

Development Status: This project is in an early development phase.

HomeRecall is a centralized backup solution for Smart Home IoT devices. It is engineered to run natively as a Home Assistant Add-on (supporting Ingress and auto-theming) but operates equally well as a standalone container or .NET application.

Its primary goal is to ensure configuration persistence for a wide range of DIY and commercial IoT devices without reliance on cloud services.

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Key Features

🔌 Device Support

HomeRecall supports configuration backup for a variety of popular firmware and devices:

• Tasmota: Backs up the main configuration (Config.dmp) and automatically includes Berry scripts (.be files) from the UFS for firmware 14.6.0 or newer.
• Shelly: Backs up the main configuration (settings.json/config.json) and additionally downloads all user scripts (.js files) for Gen 2/3 devices.
• WLED: Backs up the primary configuration (cfg.json) and all user presets (presets.json).
• Awtrix Light: Recursively backs up all files and folders stored on the device's internal flash storage.
• openHASP: Backs up all files stored on the root filesystem (e.g., UI .jsonl configurations, fonts).
• OpenDTU (untested alpha): Backs up the configuration (config.json).
• AI-on-the-Edge (untested alpha): Backs up the configuration (config.ini) and reference frames (ref0.jpg, ref1.jpg, reference.jpg).
• AhoyDTU (untested alpha)

💾 Intelligent Backup System

• Versioning & History: Keeps a history of configuration changes.
• Deduplication: Uses content-based hashing to store only unique backups, saving storage space while maintaining a full history.
• Visual Diff: The UI highlights consecutive identical backups to easily identify when a configuration actually changed.
• Mass Operations: Trigger backups for individual devices or the entire network with a single action.

🔎 Network Discovery

• Scanner: Integrated multi-threaded network scanner to find devices within IP ranges.
• Auto-Detection: Automatically identifies device types, firmware versions, and hardware models (e.g., distinguishing a "Sonoff Basic" from a generic Tasmota device).
• Live Feedback: Real-time visibility of found devices during the scan process.
• Multi-Interface Support: Discovers and tracks devices with multiple network interfaces (e.g. Wi-Fi and Ethernet) and intelligently switches interfaces during backup if one fails.
• MQTT Auto-Discovery: Automatically detects and adds devices announcing themselves on your MQTT broker (supports Tasmota for now). If a device's IP address changes, HomeRecall updates it automatically by tracking its MAC address.

🛠 Integration & Deployment

• Home Assistant: First-class citizen support via Add-on. Supports Ingress for seamless UI integration
• Portable: Runs on any platform supporting Docker or .NET 10 (Windows, Linux, macOS, Raspberry Pi).
• Localization: Interface available in English and German.
• Configurable Logging: Advanced log tracking capabilities configured seamlessly through Home Assistant Add-on options.

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Technical Architecture

This project utilizes a modern technology stack to ensure performance and maintainability:

• Framework: .NET 10 (LTS)
• UI: Blazor Server with MudBlazor (Material Design)
• Data: SQLite with Entity Framework Core
• Runtime: Docker (Alpine Linux base)

Installation

Home Assistant Add-on

1. Add this repository URL to your Home Assistant Add-on Store.
2. Install HomeRecall.
3. Start the Add-on and click "Open Web UI".

Docker (Standalone)

Ensure the data directories exist and are accessible:

mkdir -p data backups

Run the container using the official multi-arch image from GitHub Container Registry:

docker run -d \
  --name homerecall \
  -p 5000:8080 \
  -v $(pwd)/data:/config \
  -v $(pwd)/backups:/backup \
  ghcr.io/dasdandre/homerecall:latest

Automatically pulls the correct image for your architecture (amd64, arm64, arm/v7).

Local Development (Docker)

To build and run the container locally from source:

# Build the image locally
docker build -t homerecall ./homerecall

# Run the container (mounting data volume)
docker run -d -p 5000:8080 -v $(pwd)/data:/config -v $(pwd)/backups:/backup homerecall

Local Development (.NET)

Requires .NET 10 SDK.

cd homerecall
dotnet watch run

Project Background

HomeRecall represents a modern approach to software engineering. The entire codebase—from the backend architecture to the UI components—was developed through an iterative co-authoring process between a human developer and an AI Agent. This methodology emphasizes rapid prototyping, clean code standards, and robust architectural decisions.

License

Distributed under the MIT License.