I’m not a House Assistant skilled, nevertheless 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 interest that overwhelms you. Each object (entity) in your home that’s even remotely related can develop into programmable. All the things. Even folks! You may declare that any title:worth pair that (for instance) your cellphone can expose may be consumable by House Assistant. Questions like “is Scott residence” 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 may automate. Lights, remotes, Spotify, and extra. You may discover that any internally related gadget you could have probably has an Integration obtainable.
Temperature, Mild Standing, certain, that is straightforward House Automation. However integrations and third get together code may give you particulars like “Is the Dwelling Room darkish” or “is there movement within the driveway.” From these constructing blocks, you may then construct your personal IFTTT (If This Then That) automations, combining not simply two methods, however any and all disparate methods.
What’s the most effective half? This all runs LOCALLY. Not in a cloud or the cloud or anybody’s cloud. I’ve obtained 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 imagine organising House Assistant on a Pi is the most effective and best strategy 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 may 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 principle level. I used to have an Amazon Ring Doorbell that will combine with Amazon Alexa and once 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.
Nevertheless, 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 present Unifi set up and data video to an area arduous drive. Nevertheless, 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 checklist:
- Set up House Assistant
- Set up House Assistant Neighborhood Retailer
- This allows third get together “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 may see what’s taking place.
- Get the UniFi Defend third get together 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 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. Below Companies, strive pasting on this YAML and clicking “name service.”
service: notify.alexa_media_everywhere
information:
message: Somebody is on the entrance door, it is a check
information:
sort: announce
technique: communicate
If that works, you may 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 if you happen to give your entrance doorbell digital camera a distinct title.
Discover the format of Information, it is title worth pairs inside a single subject’s worth.
…nevertheless 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: communicate
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 e-book creator.
