I’m not a Residence Assistant skilled, 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 change into a pastime that overwhelms you. Each object (entity) in your home that’s even remotely linked can change into programmable. All the pieces. Even individuals! You’ll be able to declare that any title:worth pair that (for instance) your telephone can expose will be consumable by Residence Assistant. Questions like “is Scott dwelling” or “what’s Scott’s telephone battery” will 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 gadget you have got possible has an Integration accessible.
Temperature, Gentle Standing, certain, that is simple Residence 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 individual 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 received 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 organising 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 may pay Nabu Casa $5 for distant (exterior 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 once 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.
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 present Unifi set up and information video to a neighborhood exhausting 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 Residence Assistant.
Here is the final todo record:
- Set up Residence Assistant
- Set up Residence Assistant Group Retailer
- This allows third celebration “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 occurring.
- Get the UniFi Shield third celebration integration for Residence Assistant
- NOTE: Unifi Shield assist is being promoted in Residence Assistant v2022.2 so you will not want this step quickly because it’ll be included.
- “The UniFi Shield Integration provides assist for retrieving Digital camera feeds and Sensor information 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 Residence Assistant as “media gamers” and likewise 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 “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, 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
methodology: converse
If that works, you already know 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 completely different in case you give your entrance doorbell digital camera a distinct title.
Discover the format of Information, it is title worth pairs inside a single area’s worth.
…but it surely 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
information:
information:
kind: announce
methodology: 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, guide, father, diabetic, and Microsoft worker. He’s a failed stand-up comedian, a cornrower, and a e book writer.
