I’m not a House Assistant professional, however it’s clearly a large 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 rapidly develop into a pastime that overwhelms you. Each object (entity) in your own home that’s even remotely linked can develop into programmable. All the things. Even individuals! You may declare that any identify:worth pair that (for instance) your cellphone can expose may be consumable by House Assistant. Questions like “is Scott dwelling” or “what’s Scott’s cellphone battery” may 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 may discover that any internally linked machine you have got probably has an Integration accessible.
Temperature, Gentle Standing, certain, that is straightforward House Automation. However integrations and third occasion code can provide 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 individual IFTTT (If This Then That) automations, combining not simply two programs, however any and all disparate programs.
What’s one of the best half? This all runs LOCALLY. Not in a cloud or the cloud or anybody’s cloud. I’ve bought my stuff working 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 one of the best and best solution 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 (exterior your own home) community entry through clear forwarding. However to be clear, all of it nonetheless runs inside your own home and never within the cloud.
OK, to the principle 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 stunning little integration that labored properly in our lives.
Nonetheless, I swapped out the Ring for a Unifi Defend G4 Doorbell for quite a lot of causes. I do not wish to pump video to exterior providers, so this doorbell integrates properly with my current Unifi set up and data video to an area onerous drive. Nonetheless, 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 record:
- Set up House Assistant
- Set up House Assistant Neighborhood Retailer
- This allows third occasion “untrusted” integrations immediately from GitHub. You may want a GitHub account and it will clone customized integrations immediately into your native HA.
- I additionally suggest 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 Defend third occasion integration for House Assistant
- NOTE: Unifi Defend help is being promoted in House Assistant v2022.2 so you will not want this step quickly because it’ll be included.
- “The UniFi Defend Integration provides help for retrieving Digital camera feeds and Sensor information from a UniFi Defend set up on both an Ubiquiti CloudKey+, Ubiquiti UniFi Dream Machine Professional or UniFi Defend 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 likewise means that you can 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 “all over the place.” Not solely as a result of it is good to have the ability to say “play the music all over the place” however it’s also possible to goal that “In every single place” group in House Assistant.
Go into your House Assistant UI at http://homeassistant.native:8123/ and into Developer Instruments. Underneath Companies, attempt pasting on this YAML and clicking “name service.”
service: notify.alexa_media_everywhere
information:
message: Somebody is on the entrance door, this can be a take a look at
information:
sort: announce
methodology: converse
If that works, you understand 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. Observe that your Entity names could also be totally different in the event you give your entrance doorbell digital camera a special identify.
Discover the format of Information, it is identify worth pairs inside a single discipline’s worth.
…however it additionally exists in a file referred to as Automations.yaml. Observe 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
information:
information:
sort: announce
methodology: 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, marketing consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft worker. He’s a failed stand-up comedian, a cornrower, and a e-book creator.
