I’m not a Dwelling Assistant knowledgeable, nevertheless it’s clearly a large 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 pastime that overwhelms you. Each object (entity) in your own home that’s even remotely related can develop into programmable. Every little thing. Even individuals! You may declare that any title:worth pair that (for instance) your telephone can expose might be consumable by Dwelling Assistant. Questions like “is Scott house” or “what’s Scott’s telephone battery” might 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 may discover that any internally related machine you have got possible has an Integration obtainable.
Temperature, Gentle Standing, certain, that is straightforward Dwelling Automation. However integrations and third celebration 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 programs, however any and all disparate programs.
What’s the very best half? This all runs LOCALLY. Not in a cloud or the cloud or anybody’s cloud. I’ve bought 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 imagine establishing Dwelling Assistant on a Pi is the very best and best solution to get began. That stated, you can too 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 primary level. I used to have an Amazon Ring Doorbell that might combine with Amazon Alexa and once 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 Shield G4 Doorbell for a variety of causes. I do not need to pump video to exterior providers, so this doorbell integrates properly with my current Unifi set up and data video to an area onerous drive. Nonetheless, 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.
This is the overall todo listing:
- Set up Dwelling Assistant
- Set up Dwelling Assistant Group Retailer
- This allows third celebration “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 may see what’s taking place.
- Get the UniFi Shield third celebration 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 Digital camera feeds and Sensor knowledge 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 likewise 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 referred to 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 can too goal that “All over the place” group in Dwelling Assistant.
Go into your Dwelling Assistant UI at http://homeassistant.native:8123/ and into Developer Instruments. Beneath Providers, 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:
kind: announce
technique: converse
If that works, you realize 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. Word that your Entity names could also be completely different should you give your entrance doorbell digicam a special title.
Discover the format of Information, it is title worth pairs inside a single area’s worth.
…nevertheless it additionally exists in a file referred to 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:
kind: announce
technique: converse
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 ebook writer.
