I’m not a Residence Assistant professional, but it surely’s clearly an enormous and highly effective ecosystem. I’ve interviewed the creator of Residence Assistant on my podcast and I encourage you to take a look at that chat.
Residence Assistant can shortly turn out to be a passion that overwhelms you. Each object (entity) in your home that’s even remotely related can turn out to be programmable. The whole lot. Even folks! You’ll be able to declare that any identify:worth pair that (for instance) your telephone can expose will be consumable by Residence Assistant. Questions like “is Scott residence” or “what’s Scott’s telephone battery” will be related to Scott the Entity within the Residence Assistant Dashboard.
I used to be amazed on the units/objects that Residence Assistant found that it might automate. Lights, remotes, Spotify, and extra. You will discover that any internally related machine you’ve gotten possible has an Integration accessible.
Temperature, Gentle Standing, positive, that is simple Residence Automation. However integrations and third occasion code can provide you particulars like “Is the Dwelling Room darkish” or “is there movement within the driveway.” From these constructing blocks, you possibly can then construct your personal IFTTT (If This Then That) automations, combining not simply two programs, however any and all disparate programs.
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 working 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 Residence Assistant on a Pi is the most effective and best option to get began. That mentioned, 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 possibly can pay Nabu Casa $5 for distant (outdoors 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 principle level. I used to have an Amazon Ring Doorbell that might combine with Amazon Alexa and while 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.
Nonetheless, I swapped out the Ring for a Unifi Shield G4 Doorbell for plenty of causes. I do not need to pump video to outdoors providers, so this doorbell integrates properly with my current Unifi set up and information video to an area arduous 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 Residence Assistant.
This is the overall todo checklist:
- Set up Residence Assistant
- Set up Residence Assistant Neighborhood Retailer
- This permits 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 possibly can see what’s occurring.
- Get the UniFi Shield third occasion integration for Residence Assistant
- NOTE: Unifi Shield assist is being promoted in Residence Assistant v2022.2 so you will not want this step quickly because it’ll be included.
- “The UniFi Shield Integration provides assist for retrieving Digital camera feeds and Sensor knowledge 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 Residence 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 known 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 “In all places” group in Residence Assistant.
Go into your Residence Assistant UI at http://homeassistant.native:8123/ and into Developer Instruments. Beneath 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 take a look at
knowledge:
kind: announce
methodology: communicate
If that works, you understand you possibly can automate Alexa and make it say issues. Now, go to Configuration, Automation, and Add a brand new Automation. This is mine. I used the UI to create it. Be aware that your Entity names could also be completely different in case you give your entrance doorbell digital camera a unique identify.
Discover the format of Knowledge, it is identify worth pairs inside a single discipline’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
knowledge:
knowledge:
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, advisor, father, diabetic, and Microsoft worker. He’s a failed stand-up comedian, a cornrower, and a e-book creator.
