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 turn into a interest that overwhelms you. Each object (entity) in your own home that’s even remotely related can turn into programmable. Every little thing. Even individuals! You possibly can declare that any identify:worth pair that (for instance) your cellphone can expose might be consumable by House Assistant. Questions like “is Scott dwelling” or “what’s Scott’s cellphone battery” might 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 may automate. Lights, remotes, Spotify, and extra. You will discover that any internally related machine you will have probably has an Integration out there.
Temperature, Mild Standing, positive, 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 may then construct your personal IFTTT (If This Then That) automations, combining not simply two programs, however any and all disparate programs.
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 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 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 may pay Nabu Casa $5 for distant (exterior your own home) community entry by way of clear forwarding. However to be clear, all of it nonetheless runs inside your own home and never within the cloud.
OK, to the primary level. I used to have an Amazon Ring Doorbell that may combine with Amazon Alexa and while you pressed the doorbell it will say “Somebody is on the entrance door” on our all Alexas. It was a beautiful 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 wish to pump video to exterior providers, so this doorbell integrates properly with my present Unifi set up and data video to an area onerous drive. Nevertheless, 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 overall todo listing:
- Set up House Assistant
- Set up House Assistant Group Retailer
- This allows third celebration “untrusted” integrations straight from GitHub. You will want a GitHub account and it will clone customized integrations straight into your native HA.
- I additionally suggest 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 celebration integration for House Assistant
- NOTE: Unifi Defend assist 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 assist for retrieving Digicam 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 “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 it’s also possible to goal that “All over the place” group in House Assistant.
Go into your House Assistant UI at http://homeassistant.native:8123/ and into Developer Instruments. Below Companies, attempt 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 check
knowledge:
kind: announce
technique: communicate
If that works, you recognize 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. Word that your Entity names could also be totally different in case you give your entrance doorbell digital camera a special identify.
Discover the format of Information, it is identify worth pairs inside a single area’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
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, guide, father, diabetic, and Microsoft worker. He’s a failed stand-up comedian, a cornrower, and a e-book writer.
