I’m not a Dwelling Assistant professional, but it surely’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 rapidly change into a interest that overwhelms you. Each object (entity) in your home that’s even remotely linked can change into programmable. All the things. Even individuals! You may declare that any identify:worth pair that (for instance) your telephone can expose will be consumable by Dwelling Assistant. Questions like “is Scott residence” or “what’s Scott’s telephone battery” will 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 might automate. Lights, remotes, Spotify, and extra. You may discover that any internally linked machine you’ve got possible has an Integration accessible.
Temperature, Mild Standing, positive, that is straightforward Dwelling Automation. However integrations and third get together code can provide you particulars like “Is the Residing 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 one of the best 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 consider organising Dwelling Assistant on a Pi is one of the best and best solution to get began. That mentioned, it’s also possible to 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 will combine with Amazon Alexa and if 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.
Nevertheless, I swapped out the Ring for a Unifi Shield G4 Doorbell for a lot of causes. I do not need to pump video to exterior companies, so this doorbell integrates properly with my current 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.
Here is the final todo listing:
- Set up Dwelling Assistant
- Set up Dwelling Assistant Neighborhood Retailer
- This allows third get together “untrusted” integrations immediately from GitHub. You may want a GitHub account and it will clone customized integrations immediately 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 Shield third get together 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 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 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 “in all places.” Not solely as a result of it is good to have the ability to say “play the music in all places” however it’s also possible to goal that “In every single place” group in Dwelling Assistant.
Go into your Dwelling Assistant UI at http://homeassistant.native:8123/ and into Developer Instruments. Below Providers, attempt 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
technique: communicate
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. Notice that your Entity names could also be totally different in case you give your entrance doorbell digital camera a distinct identify.
Discover the format of Knowledge, it is identify worth pairs inside a single area’s worth.
…but it surely additionally exists in a file referred to as Automations.yaml. Notice 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
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 guide writer.
