I’m not a House Assistant professional, but it surely’s clearly an enormous and highly effective ecosystem. I’ve interviewed the creator of House Assistant on my podcast and I encourage you to take a look at that chat.
House Assistant can shortly grow to be a interest that overwhelms you. Each object (entity) in your home that’s even remotely related can grow to be programmable. Every part. Even folks! You possibly can declare that any title:worth pair that (for instance) your telephone can expose might be consumable by House Assistant. Questions like “is Scott house” or “what’s Scott’s telephone battery” might be related to Scott the Entity within the House Assistant Dashboard.
I used to be amazed on the gadgets/objects that House Assistant found that it might automate. Lights, remotes, Spotify, and extra. You will discover that any internally related gadget you could have probably has an Integration out there.
Temperature, Gentle Standing, certain, that is straightforward House Automation. However integrations and third occasion code may give you particulars like “Is the Dwelling Room darkish” or “is there movement within the driveway.” From these constructing blocks, you’ll be able to then construct your personal IFTTT (If This Then That) automations, combining not simply two techniques, however any and all disparate techniques.
What’s the very best half? This all runs LOCALLY. Not in a cloud or the cloud or anybody’s cloud. I’ve received my stuff operating on a Raspberry Pi 4. Even higher I put a Energy Over Ethernet (PoE) hat on my Rpi so I’ve only one community wire into my hub that powers the Pi.
I consider establishing House Assistant on a Pi is the very best and best method to get began. That stated, it’s also possible to run in a Docker Container, on a Synology or different NAS, or simply on Home windows or Mac within the background. It is as much as you. Optionally, you’ll be able to pay Nabu Casa $5 for distant (outdoors your home) community entry by way of clear forwarding. However to be clear, all of it nonetheless runs inside your home and never within the cloud.
OK, to the primary level. I used to have an Amazon Ring Doorbell that may combine with Amazon Alexa and whenever you pressed the doorbell it could say “Somebody is on the entrance door” on our all Alexas. It was a beautiful little integration that labored properly in our lives.
Nevertheless, I swapped out the Ring for a Unifi Shield G4 Doorbell for quite a few causes. I do not need to pump video to outdoors providers, so this doorbell integrates properly with my present Unifi set up and data video to a neighborhood arduous drive. Nevertheless, I lose any Alexa integration and this good little “somebody is on the door” announcement. So this looks as if an ideal job for House Assistant.
Here is the overall todo listing:
- Set up House Assistant
- Set up House Assistant Group Retailer
- This permits third occasion “untrusted” integrations instantly from GitHub. You will want a GitHub account and it will clone customized integrations instantly into your native HA.
- I additionally advocate the Terminal & SSH (9.2.2), File editor (5.3.3) add ons so you’ll be able to see what’s taking place.
- Get the UniFi Shield third occasion integration for House Assistant
- NOTE: Unifi Shield help is being promoted in House Assistant v2022.2 so you will not want this step quickly because it’ll be included.
- “The UniFi Shield Integration provides help for retrieving Digital camera feeds and Sensor knowledge from a UniFi Shield set up on both an Ubiquiti CloudKey+, Ubiquiti UniFi Dream Machine Professional or UniFi Shield Community Video Recorder.”
- Authenticate and configure this integration.
- Get the Alexa Media Participant integration
- This makes all of your Alexas present up in House Assistant as “media gamers” and in addition permits you to tts (textual content to speech) to them.
- Authenticate and configure this integration.
I like to recommend going into your Alexa app and making a Multi-room Speaker Group referred to as “in all places.” Not solely as a result of it is good to have the ability to say “play the music in all places” however it’s also possible to goal that “All over the place” group in House Assistant.
Go into your House Assistant UI at http://homeassistant.native:8123/ and into Developer Instruments. Below Companies, attempt pasting on this YAML and clicking “name service.”
service: notify.alexa_media_everywhere
knowledge:
message: Somebody is on the entrance door, it is a check
knowledge:
kind: announce
technique: converse
If that works, you’ll be able to automate Alexa and make it say issues. Now, go to Configuration, Automation, and Add a brand new Automation. Here is mine. I used the UI to create it. Notice that your Entity names could also be totally different for those who give your entrance doorbell digital camera a unique title.
Discover the format of Knowledge, it is title worth pairs inside a single subject’s worth.
…but it surely additionally exists in a file referred to as Automations.yaml. Notice that the “to: ‘on'” set off is required otherwise you’ll get double bulletins, one for every state change within the doorbell.
- id: '1640995128073'
alias: G4 Doorbell Announcement with Alexa
description: G4 Doorbell Announcement with Alexa
set off:
- platform: state
entity_id: binary_sensor.front_door_doorbell
to: 'on'
situation: []
motion:
- service: notify.alexa_media_everywhere
knowledge:
knowledge:
kind: announce
technique: converse
message: Somebody is on the entrance door
mode: single
It really works! There is a ton of cool stuff I can automate now!
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About Scott
Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, guide, father, diabetic, and Microsoft worker. He’s a failed stand-up comedian, a cornrower, and a ebook creator.
