I’m not a Residence Assistant professional, however it’s clearly an enormous and highly effective ecosystem. I’ve interviewed the creator of Residence Assistant on my podcast and I encourage you to take a look at that chat.
Residence Assistant can shortly develop into a pastime that overwhelms you. Each object (entity) in your own home that’s even remotely linked can develop into programmable. The whole lot. Even folks! You possibly can declare that any identify:worth pair that (for instance) your cellphone can expose may be consumable by Residence Assistant. Questions like “is Scott residence” or “what’s Scott’s cellphone battery” may be related to Scott the Entity within the Residence Assistant Dashboard.
I used to be amazed on the units/objects that Residence Assistant found that it may automate. Lights, remotes, Spotify, and extra. You may discover that any internally linked gadget you’ve possible has an Integration accessible.
Temperature, Mild Standing, positive, that is straightforward Residence 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 possibly can then construct your individual IFTTT (If This Then That) automations, combining not simply two methods, however any and all disparate methods.
What’s the perfect half? This all runs LOCALLY. Not in a cloud or the cloud or anybody’s cloud. I’ve received 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 Residence Assistant on a Pi is the perfect 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 possibly can pay Nabu Casa $5 for distant (outdoors 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 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 a lot of causes. I do not need to pump video to outdoors companies, so this doorbell integrates properly with my present Unifi set up and data video to a neighborhood arduous drive. Nonetheless, I lose any Alexa integration and this good little “somebody is on the door” announcement. So this looks like an ideal job for Residence Assistant.
This is the overall todo listing:
- Set up Residence Assistant
- Set up Residence Assistant Group Retailer
- This allows third occasion “untrusted” integrations instantly from GitHub. You may want a GitHub account and it will clone customized integrations instantly into your native HA.
- I additionally suggest the Terminal & SSH (9.2.2), File editor (5.3.3) add ons so you possibly can see what’s taking place.
- Get the UniFi Defend third occasion integration for Residence Assistant
- NOTE: Unifi Defend help is being promoted in Residence Assistant v2022.2 so you will not want this step quickly because it’ll be included.
- “The UniFi Defend Integration provides help for retrieving Digicam 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 Residence Assistant as “media gamers” and in addition 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 “in every single place.” Not solely as a result of it is good to have the ability to say “play the music in every single place” however it’s also possible to goal that “In all places” group in Residence Assistant.
Go into your Residence Assistant UI at http://homeassistant.native:8123/ and into Developer Instruments. Beneath Providers, strive 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 technique: converse
If that works, you understand you possibly can 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. Observe that your Entity names could also be totally different in case you give your entrance doorbell digital camera a unique identify.
Discover the format of Information, it is identify worth pairs inside a single subject’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 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, advisor, father, diabetic, and Microsoft worker. He’s a failed stand-up comedian, a cornrower, and a ebook creator.
