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 change into a pastime that overwhelms you. Each object (entity) in your home that’s even remotely related can change into programmable. All the pieces. Even folks! You possibly can declare that any identify:worth pair that (for instance) your cellphone can expose could be consumable by House Assistant. Questions like “is Scott dwelling” or “what’s Scott’s cellphone battery” could 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 might automate. Lights, remotes, Spotify, and extra. You will discover that any internally related system you have got possible has an Integration accessible.
Temperature, Gentle Standing, certain, that is simple House Automation. However integrations and third occasion code may give 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 individual 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 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 House Assistant on a Pi is the perfect and best method 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’ll be able to pay Nabu Casa $5 for distant (outdoors 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 might 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 Defend G4 Doorbell for a lot of causes. I do not wish to pump video to outdoors companies, so this doorbell integrates properly with my present Unifi set up and information video to an area laborious 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 record:
- Set up House Assistant
- Set up House Assistant Neighborhood Retailer
- This allows third occasion “untrusted” integrations straight from GitHub. You will want a GitHub account and it will clone customized integrations straight 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 occurring.
- Get the UniFi Defend third occasion integration for House Assistant
- NOTE: Unifi Defend assist 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 assist for retrieving Digicam feeds and Sensor knowledge 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 in addition 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 you can too goal that “In all places” group in House Assistant.
Go into your House Assistant UI at http://homeassistant.native:8123/ and into Developer Instruments. Underneath Companies, attempt pasting on this YAML and clicking “name service.”
service: notify.alexa_media_everywhere
knowledge:
message: Somebody is on the entrance door, this can be a check
knowledge:
kind: announce
technique: converse
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 in the event you give your entrance doorbell digital camera a unique identify.
Discover the format of Information, it is identify worth pairs inside a single discipline’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
knowledge:
knowledge:
kind: announce
technique: 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 guide writer.
