I’m not a House Assistant knowledgeable, however 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 turn out to be a interest that overwhelms you. Each object (entity) in your own home that’s even remotely related can turn out to be programmable. All the things. Even folks! You may declare that any title:worth pair that (for instance) your telephone can expose will be consumable by House Assistant. Questions like “is Scott dwelling” or “what’s Scott’s telephone battery” will 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 system you’ve doubtless has an Integration accessible.
Temperature, Mild Standing, certain, that is straightforward House Automation. However integrations and third social gathering code can provide you particulars like “Is the Dwelling Room darkish” or “is there movement within the driveway.” From these constructing blocks, you may then construct your individual 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 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 House Assistant on a Pi is the perfect and best solution to get began. That stated, 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 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 primary level. I used to have an Amazon Ring Doorbell that may 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 Shield G4 Doorbell for numerous causes. I do not need to pump video to outdoors providers, so this doorbell integrates properly with my present Unifi set up and information video to a neighborhood exhausting 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 record:
- Set up House Assistant
- Set up House Assistant Neighborhood Retailer
- This permits third social gathering “untrusted” integrations instantly from GitHub. You will 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 may see what’s occurring.
- Get the UniFi Shield third social gathering integration for House Assistant
- NOTE: Unifi Shield assist 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 assist for retrieving Digicam feeds and Sensor information 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 in addition 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 “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. Beneath Companies, 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 check
information:
sort: announce
methodology: 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 completely different for those who give your entrance doorbell digital camera a distinct title.
Discover the format of Information, it is title worth pairs inside a single discipline’s worth.
…however it additionally exists in a file known 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
methodology: 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 ebook writer.
