I’m not a Residence Assistant skilled, but it surely’s clearly an enormous and highly effective ecosystem. I’ve interviewed the creator of Residence Assistant on my podcast and I encourage you to take a look at that chat.
Residence Assistant can shortly turn into a pastime that overwhelms you. Each object (entity) in your home that’s even remotely linked can turn into programmable. All the pieces. Even individuals! You may declare that any identify:worth pair that (for instance) your cellphone can expose could be consumable by Residence Assistant. Questions like “is Scott residence” or “what’s Scott’s cellphone battery” could be related to Scott the Entity within the Residence Assistant Dashboard.
I used to be amazed on the gadgets/objects that Residence Assistant found that it might automate. Lights, remotes, Spotify, and extra. You will discover that any internally linked machine you’ve probably has an Integration obtainable.
Temperature, Gentle Standing, certain, that is straightforward Residence 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’ll be able to then construct your personal IFTTT (If This Then That) automations, combining not simply two methods, however any and all disparate methods.
What’s the perfect half? This all runs LOCALLY. Not in a cloud or the cloud or anybody’s cloud. I’ve obtained 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 Residence Assistant on a Pi is the perfect and best solution to get began. That mentioned, you may as well 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 home) community entry by way of clear forwarding. However to be clear, all of it nonetheless runs inside your 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 if you pressed the doorbell it could say “Somebody is on the entrance door” on our all Alexas. It was a beautiful little integration that labored properly in our lives.
Nonetheless, I swapped out the Ring for a Unifi Defend G4 Doorbell for a variety of causes. I do not wish to pump video to outdoors companies, so this doorbell integrates properly with my present Unifi set up and data video to a neighborhood onerous drive. Nonetheless, I lose any Alexa integration and this good little “somebody is on the door” announcement. So this looks like an ideal job for Residence Assistant.
This is the final todo checklist:
- Set up Residence Assistant
- Set up Residence Assistant Neighborhood Retailer
- This permits third social gathering “untrusted” integrations immediately from GitHub. You will want a GitHub account and it will clone customized integrations immediately into your native HA.
- I additionally suggest 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 social gathering integration for Residence Assistant
- NOTE: Unifi Defend help is being promoted in Residence Assistant v2022.2 so you will not want this step quickly because it’ll be included.
- “The UniFi Defend Integration provides help 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 Residence 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 as well goal that “All over the place” group in Residence Assistant.
Go into your Residence Assistant UI at http://homeassistant.native:8123/ and into Developer Instruments. Underneath Providers, 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 take a look at
knowledge:
sort: announce
methodology: 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. This is mine. I used the UI to create it. Be aware that your Entity names could also be completely different when you 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. 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
knowledge:
knowledge:
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, advisor, father, diabetic, and Microsoft worker. He’s a failed stand-up comedian, a cornrower, and a e book creator.
