I’m not a House Assistant knowledgeable, nevertheless it’s clearly an enormous and highly effective ecosystem. I’ve interviewed the creator of House Assistant on my podcast and I encourage you to take a look at that chat.
House Assistant can rapidly grow to be a interest that overwhelms you. Each object (entity) in your home that’s even remotely related can grow to be programmable. Every thing. Even folks! You may declare that any title:worth pair that (for instance) your cellphone can expose might be consumable by House Assistant. Questions like “is Scott house” or “what’s Scott’s cellphone battery” might be related to Scott the Entity within the House Assistant Dashboard.
I used to be amazed on the units/objects that House Assistant found that it may automate. Lights, remotes, Spotify, and extra. You may discover that any internally related machine you might have possible has an Integration accessible.
Temperature, Gentle Standing, certain, that is straightforward House Automation. However integrations and third celebration code can provide you particulars like “Is the Dwelling Room darkish” or “is there movement within the driveway.” From these constructing blocks, you’ll be able to then construct your individual IFTTT (If This Then That) automations, combining not simply two methods, however any and all disparate methods.
What’s the most effective half? This all runs LOCALLY. Not in a cloud or the cloud or anybody’s cloud. I’ve obtained 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 establishing House Assistant on a Pi is the most effective and best solution 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 home) community entry through 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 whenever you pressed the doorbell it could say “Somebody is on the entrance door” on our all Alexas. It was a stunning little integration that labored properly in our lives.
Nonetheless, I swapped out the Ring for a Unifi Defend G4 Doorbell for various causes. I do not need to pump video to exterior companies, so this doorbell integrates properly with my present Unifi set up and data video to an area exhausting drive. Nonetheless, I lose any Alexa integration and this good little “somebody is on the door” announcement. So this looks like an ideal job for House Assistant.
Here is the overall todo checklist:
- Set up House Assistant
- Set up House Assistant Neighborhood Retailer
- This permits third celebration “untrusted” integrations straight from GitHub. You may want a GitHub account and it will clone customized integrations straight into your native HA.
- I additionally suggest 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 celebration integration for House Assistant
- NOTE: Unifi Defend help is being promoted in House 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 House Assistant as “media gamers” and likewise 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 all places.” Not solely as a result of it is good to have the ability to say “play the music in all places” however you can even goal that “In all places” group in House Assistant.
Go into your House 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
information:
message: Somebody is on the entrance door, this can be a take a look at
information:
kind: announce
methodology: communicate
If that works, you already know 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 for those who give your entrance doorbell digicam a unique 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
information:
information:
kind: announce
methodology: 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 ebook creator.
