I’m not a House Assistant knowledgeable, nevertheless 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 grow to be a passion that overwhelms you. Each object (entity) in your home that’s even remotely linked can grow to be programmable. Every little thing. Even individuals! You may declare that any identify:worth pair that (for instance) your telephone can expose may be consumable by House Assistant. Questions like “is Scott residence” or “what’s Scott’s telephone battery” may be related to Scott the Entity within the House Assistant Dashboard.
I used to be amazed on the units/objects that House Assistant found that it might automate. Lights, remotes, Spotify, and extra. You may discover that any internally linked system you’ve gotten possible has an Integration accessible.
Temperature, Gentle Standing, certain, that is simple House Automation. However integrations and third celebration code may give 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 techniques, however any and all disparate techniques.
What’s the most effective half? This all runs LOCALLY. Not in a cloud or the cloud or anybody’s cloud. I’ve bought 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 imagine establishing House Assistant on a Pi is the most effective and best strategy to get began. That mentioned, you can even 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 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 will combine with Amazon Alexa and while you pressed the doorbell it might 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 Shield G4 Doorbell for quite a lot of causes. I do not wish to pump video to outdoors companies, so this doorbell integrates properly with my current Unifi set up and data 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 like an ideal job for House Assistant.
This is the final todo record:
- Set up House Assistant
- Set up House Assistant Group Retailer
- This allows third celebration “untrusted” integrations instantly from GitHub. You may 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 possibly can see what’s taking place.
- Get the UniFi Shield third celebration 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 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 known 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 you can even 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 Providers, strive 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:
sort: announce
technique: converse
If that works, you already know 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. Notice that your Entity names could also be completely different for those who give your entrance doorbell digital camera a unique identify.
Discover the format of Knowledge, it is identify worth pairs inside a single discipline’s worth.
…nevertheless it additionally exists in a file known 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:
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, marketing consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft worker. He’s a failed stand-up comedian, a cornrower, and a e book creator.
