I’m not a House Assistant knowledgeable, but it surely’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 grow to be a interest that overwhelms you. Each object (entity) in your own home that’s even remotely related can grow to be programmable. All the things. Even folks! You may declare that any identify:worth pair that (for instance) your cellphone can expose could be consumable by House Assistant. Questions like “is Scott residence” or “what’s Scott’s cellphone battery” could 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 might automate. Lights, remotes, Spotify, and extra. You may discover that any internally related gadget you’ve possible has an Integration obtainable.
Temperature, Gentle Standing, positive, that is simple House Automation. However integrations and third get together code can provide you particulars like “Is the Dwelling Room darkish” or “is there movement within the driveway.” From these constructing blocks, you’ll be able to then construct your individual IFTTT (If This Then That) automations, combining not simply two methods, however any and all disparate methods.
What’s the very best half? This all runs LOCALLY. Not in a cloud or the cloud or anybody’s cloud. I’ve acquired 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 organising House Assistant on a Pi is the very best and best option 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’ll be able to 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 principle level. I used to have an Amazon Ring Doorbell that might combine with Amazon Alexa and if 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 quite a lot of causes. I do not wish to pump video to outdoors providers, so this doorbell integrates properly with my current Unifi set up and data video to an area laborious 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.
Here is the final todo checklist:
- Set up House Assistant
- Set up House Assistant Neighborhood Retailer
- This allows third get together “untrusted” integrations immediately from GitHub. You may 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’ll be able to 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 in addition permits you to 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 you too can 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 Providers, 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:
kind: announce
technique: communicate
If that works, you understand you’ll be able to 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. Be aware that your Entity names could also be totally different when you give your entrance doorbell digital camera a distinct identify.
Discover the format of Knowledge, it is identify worth pairs inside a single subject’s worth.
…but it surely additionally exists in a file referred to as Automations.yaml. Be aware 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:
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, marketing consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft worker. He’s a failed stand-up comedian, a cornrower, and a guide creator.
