I’m not a House Assistant knowledgeable, however it’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 change into a pastime that overwhelms you. Each object (entity) in your home that’s even remotely linked can change into programmable. All the things. Even individuals! You possibly can declare that any title:worth pair that (for instance) your cellphone can expose could be consumable by House Assistant. Questions like “is Scott residence” or “what’s Scott’s cellphone battery” could 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 may automate. Lights, remotes, Spotify, and extra. You may discover that any internally linked gadget you might have seemingly has an Integration out there.
Temperature, Gentle Standing, certain, that is simple House Automation. However integrations and third occasion code can provide you particulars like “Is the Residing 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 perfect half? This all runs LOCALLY. Not in a cloud or the cloud or anybody’s cloud. I’ve obtained 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 organising House Assistant on a Pi is the perfect and best approach to get began. That mentioned, you too can 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 through 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 might combine with Amazon Alexa and if you pressed the doorbell it will 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 numerous causes. I do not need to pump video to outdoors companies, so this doorbell integrates properly with my current Unifi set up and information video to an area laborious 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.
This is the final todo listing:
- Set up House Assistant
- Set up House Assistant Group Retailer
- This allows third occasion “untrusted” integrations straight from GitHub. You may want a GitHub account and it will clone customized integrations straight 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 occurring.
- 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 knowledge 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 lets you 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 you too can 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, strive pasting on this YAML and clicking “name service.”
service: notify.alexa_media_everywhere knowledge: message: Somebody is on the entrance door, this can be a take a look at knowledge: kind: announce methodology: converse
If that works, you already know you’ll be able to automate Alexa and make it say issues. Now, go to Configuration, Automation, and Add a brand new Automation. This is mine. I used the UI to create it. Word that your Entity names could also be totally different if you happen to give your entrance doorbell digicam a distinct title.
Discover the format of Information, it is title worth pairs inside a single subject’s worth.
…however it additionally exists in a file referred to as Automations.yaml. Word 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 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, guide, father, diabetic, and Microsoft worker. He’s a failed stand-up comedian, a cornrower, and a ebook creator.
