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 develop into a passion that overwhelms you. Each object (entity) in your home that’s even remotely related can develop into programmable. Every thing. Even folks! You may declare that any identify:worth pair that (for instance) your cellphone can expose might be consumable by Dwelling Assistant. Questions like “is Scott house” or “what’s Scott’s cellphone battery” might 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 related system you’ve possible has an Integration obtainable.
Temperature, Mild Standing, certain, that is straightforward Dwelling Automation. However integrations and third celebration code may give you particulars like “Is the Residing Room darkish” or “is there movement within the driveway.” From these constructing blocks, you possibly can then construct your individual IFTTT (If This Then That) automations, combining not simply two techniques, however any and all disparate techniques.
What’s the most effective half? This all runs LOCALLY. Not in a cloud or the cloud or anybody’s cloud. I’ve bought 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 establishing Dwelling Assistant on a Pi is the most effective and best technique to get began. That mentioned, you can too 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 possibly can 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 principle level. I used to have an Amazon Ring Doorbell that might combine with Amazon Alexa and whenever you pressed the doorbell it might 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 a lot of causes. I do not wish to pump video to exterior providers, so this doorbell integrates properly with my current Unifi set up and data video to an area exhausting 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 record:
- Set up Dwelling Assistant
- Set up Dwelling Assistant Neighborhood Retailer
- This allows 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 possibly can see what’s taking place.
- Get the UniFi Defend third celebration 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 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 known 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 too 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, 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 take a look at
information:
sort: announce
technique: communicate
If that works, you recognize you possibly can 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. Be aware that your Entity names could also be totally different if you happen to give your entrance doorbell digicam a special 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 known as Automations.yaml. Be aware 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:
sort: 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, advisor, father, diabetic, and Microsoft worker. He’s a failed stand-up comedian, a cornrower, and a guide creator.
