I’m not a house assistant skilled, however it’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 turn out to be an amazing pastime. Each object (entity) in your house that’s related even remotely can turn out to be programmable. All. Even the individuals! You may declare that Dwelling Assistant can devour any identify:worth pair that (for instance) your cellphone can expose. Questions like “Is Scott house?” or “What is the battery on Scott’s cellphone?” They are often related to Scott the Entity within the Dwelling Assistant Dashboard.
I used to be shocked by the gadgets/objects that Dwelling Assistant found it may automate. Lights, distant controls, Spotify and extra. You may discover that any internally related system you’ve gotten most likely has an integration out there.
Temperature, state of sunshine, after all, that is easy house automation. However third-party integrations and code can provide you particulars like “Is the lounge darkish?” or “Is there motion within the driveway?” From these fundamental elements, you may create your personal IFTTT (If This Then That) automations, combining not simply two techniques, however any and all disparate techniques.
What’s the better part? All of that is run LOCALLY. Not in a cloud or in anybody’s cloud or cloud. I bought my stuff operating on a Raspberry Pi 4. Even higher I put a Energy Over Ethernet (PoE) HAT on my Rpi so I solely have one community cable on my hub that powers the Pi.
I feel establishing Dwelling Assistant on a Pi It’s the greatest and best strategy to begin. That mentioned, you too can run it in a Docker container, on a Synology or different NAS, or simply on Home windows or Mac within the background. As much as you. Optionally you may pay Nabu Home $5 for distant community entry (outdoors your own home) utilizing clear forwarding. However to be clear, every part nonetheless works inside your own home and never within the cloud.
Okay, to the primary level. I used to have an Amazon Ring doorbell that built-in with Amazon Alexa and once you pressed the doorbell it mentioned “Somebody is on the entrance door” on all of our Alexas. It was a beautiful little integration that labored very properly in our lives.
Nevertheless, I exchanged the ring for a Unifi Defend G4 Doorbell for a number of causes. I do not need to stream video to exterior providers, so this doorbell integrates very properly with my present Unifi set up and data video to a neighborhood onerous 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 Dwelling Assistant.
Right here is the final to-do record:
- Set up house assistant
- Set up Dwelling Assistant Group Retailer
- This enables “untrusted” third-party integrations straight from GitHub. You may want a GitHub account and can clone customized integrations straight into your on-premises HA.
- I additionally advocate the Terminal & SSH (9.2.2), File Editor (5.3.3) plugins so you may see what’s taking place.
- Get the UniFi Defend Third Social gathering Integration for Dwelling Assistant
- NOTE: Help for Unifi Defend is being promoted in Dwelling Assistant v2022.2, so you will not want this step anytime quickly as it will likely be included.
- “The UniFi Defend integration provides help for retrieving digicam streams and sensor knowledge from a UniFi Defend set up to 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 seem in Dwelling Assistant as “media gamers” and likewise means that you can ship 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 all places.” Not solely as a result of it is good to have the ability to say “play music in all places,” however you too can goal that “In every single place” group in Dwelling Assistant.
Go to the Dwelling Assistant person interface on http://homeassistant.native:8123/ and in Developer instruments. In Companies, attempt pasting this YAML and clicking “name service”.
service: notify.alexa_media_everywhere knowledge: message: Somebody is on the entrance door, it is a take a look at knowledge: sort: announce methodology: converse
If that works, you already know you may automate Alexa and have her say issues. Now, go to Settings, Automation, and Add a brand new automation. Right here is mine. I used the UI to create it. Please notice that your entity names could also be completely different should you give the entrance doorbell digicam a distinct identify.
Take a look at the format of Knowledge, its identify and worth pairs throughout the worth of a single discipline.
…nevertheless it additionally exists in a file known as Automations.yaml. Please notice that the “to: ‘on'” set off is required or you’ll obtain double advertisements, one for each change of state on 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: converse message: Somebody is on the entrance door mode: single
Works! There are quite a lot of cool issues I can automate now!
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About Scott
Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former chief monetary architect, now speaker, guide, father, diabetic, and Microsoft worker. He’s a failed comic, a pigtailer and a e book creator.