I’m not a Residence Assistant professional, but it surely’s clearly a large 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 rapidly develop into a passion that overwhelms you. Each object (entity) in your own home that’s even remotely linked can develop into programmable. All the pieces. Even folks! You may declare that any identify:worth pair that (for instance) your cellphone can expose will be consumable by Residence Assistant. Questions like “is Scott house” or “what’s Scott’s cellphone battery” will be related to Scott the Entity within the Residence Assistant Dashboard.
I used to be amazed on the units/objects that Residence Assistant found that it may automate. Lights, remotes, Spotify, and extra. You will discover that any internally linked machine you might have probably has an Integration accessible.
Temperature, Mild Standing, certain, that is simple Residence Automation. However integrations and third occasion 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 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 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 Residence Assistant on a Pi is the very best and best technique 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 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 principle level. I used to have an Amazon Ring Doorbell that may combine with Amazon Alexa and while you pressed the doorbell it could say “Somebody is on the entrance door” on our all Alexas. It was a stunning little integration that labored properly in our lives.
Nonetheless, I swapped out the Ring for a Unifi Defend G4 Doorbell for a lot of causes. I do not wish to pump video to exterior companies, so this doorbell integrates properly with my current Unifi set up and information video to an area laborious 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.
Here is the overall todo record:
- Set up Residence Assistant
- Set up Residence Assistant Group Retailer
- This allows third occasion “untrusted” integrations instantly from GitHub. You will want a GitHub account and it will clone customized integrations instantly 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 occasion 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 Digital camera 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 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 known as “in every single place.” Not solely as a result of it is good to have the ability to say “play the music in every single place” however you may as well goal that “In every single place” group in Residence Assistant.
Go into your Residence 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
knowledge:
message: Somebody is on the entrance door, this can be a check
knowledge:
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. Word that your Entity names could also be totally different when you give your entrance doorbell digital camera a distinct identify.
Discover the format of Information, it is identify worth pairs inside a single subject’s worth.
…but it surely additionally exists in a file known 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:
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!
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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.
