I’m not a Dwelling Assistant skilled, but it surely’s clearly an enormous and highly effective ecosystem. I’ve interviewed the creator of Dwelling Assistant on my podcast and I encourage you to take a look at that chat.
Dwelling Assistant can shortly develop into a interest that overwhelms you. Each object (entity) in your own home that’s even remotely related can develop into programmable. Every part. Even individuals! You may declare that any identify:worth pair that (for instance) your telephone can expose may be consumable by Dwelling Assistant. Questions like “is Scott dwelling” or “what’s Scott’s telephone battery” may be related to Scott the Entity within the Dwelling Assistant Dashboard.
I used to be amazed on the gadgets/objects that Dwelling Assistant found that it might automate. Lights, remotes, Spotify, and extra. You will discover that any internally related machine you could have doubtless has an Integration accessible.
Temperature, Gentle Standing, certain, that is straightforward Dwelling Automation. However integrations and third occasion 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 one of the best 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 Dwelling Assistant on a Pi is one of the best and best strategy to get began. That mentioned, you may also 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 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 might 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 beautiful little integration that labored properly in our lives.
Nevertheless, I swapped out the Ring for a Unifi Shield G4 Doorbell for quite a lot of causes. I do not need to pump video to exterior companies, so this doorbell integrates properly with my current Unifi set up and information 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 Dwelling Assistant.
Here is the final todo listing:
- Set up Dwelling Assistant
- Set up Dwelling Assistant Neighborhood Retailer
- This permits third occasion “untrusted” integrations immediately from GitHub. You will want a GitHub account and it will clone customized integrations immediately 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 Shield third occasion integration for Dwelling Assistant
- NOTE: Unifi Shield help is being promoted in Dwelling Assistant v2022.2 so you will not want this step quickly because it’ll be included.
- “The UniFi Shield Integration provides help 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 Dwelling 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 may also goal that “In all places” group in Dwelling Assistant.
Go into your Dwelling 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, it is a take a look at
information:
sort: 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. Here is mine. I used the UI to create it. Observe that your Entity names could also be totally different for those who give your entrance doorbell digicam a special identify.
Discover the format of Information, it is identify worth pairs inside a single discipline’s worth.
…but it surely 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
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!
Sponsor: Make login Auth0’s drawback. Not yours. Present the handy login options your prospects need, like social login, multi-factor authentication, single sign-on, passwordless, and extra. Get began without cost.
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 writer.
