I’m not a Dwelling Assistant professional, however 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 change into a passion that overwhelms you. Each object (entity) in your own home that’s even remotely linked can change into programmable. Every thing. Even folks! You’ll be able to declare that any title:worth pair that (for instance) your telephone can expose could be consumable by Dwelling Assistant. Questions like “is Scott house” or “what’s Scott’s telephone battery” could be related to Scott the Entity within the Dwelling Assistant Dashboard.
I used to be amazed on the units/objects that Dwelling Assistant found that it may automate. Lights, remotes, Spotify, and extra. You may discover that any internally linked machine you have got seemingly has an Integration obtainable.
Temperature, Mild Standing, positive, that is straightforward Dwelling Automation. However integrations and third occasion code can provide you particulars like “Is the Residing 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 techniques, however any and all disparate techniques.
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 Dwelling Assistant on a Pi is the perfect and best method to get began. That stated, you can even 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 (exterior your own home) community entry through 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 might combine with Amazon Alexa and while you pressed the doorbell it will say “Somebody is on the entrance door” on our all Alexas. It was a stunning little integration that labored properly in our lives.
Nevertheless, I swapped out the Ring for a Unifi Defend G4 Doorbell for various causes. I do not wish to pump video to exterior companies, so this doorbell integrates properly with my present Unifi set up and data video to a neighborhood exhausting drive. Nevertheless, 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.
Here is the overall todo checklist:
- Set up Dwelling Assistant
- Set up Dwelling Assistant Group Retailer
- This permits third occasion “untrusted” integrations instantly from GitHub. You may want a GitHub account and it will clone customized integrations instantly into your native HA.
- I additionally advocate 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 occasion integration for Dwelling Assistant
- NOTE: Unifi Defend help is being promoted in Dwelling 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 information 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 Dwelling Assistant as “media gamers” and in addition 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 referred to 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 can even 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. 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 take a look at
information:
kind: announce
methodology: communicateIf 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. Here 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 digital camera a distinct title.
Discover the format of Knowledge, it is title worth pairs inside a single subject’s worth.
…however 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
information:
information:
kind: announce
methodology: communicate
message: Somebody is on the entrance door
mode: singleIt 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, marketing consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft worker. He’s a failed stand-up comedian, a cornrower, and a e-book creator.
