I’m not a Dwelling Assistant skilled, but it surely’s clearly an enormous 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 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. Every part. Even folks! You may declare that any title:worth pair that (for instance) your cellphone can expose could be consumable by Dwelling Assistant. Questions like “is Scott dwelling” or “what’s Scott’s cellphone battery” could 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 will discover that any internally related machine you’ve gotten doubtless has an Integration out there.
Temperature, Gentle Standing, positive, that is straightforward Dwelling 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 may then construct your personal 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 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 imagine establishing Dwelling Assistant on a Pi is the perfect and best strategy to get began. That mentioned, you too can 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 (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 primary level. I used to have an Amazon Ring Doorbell that may 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 companies, so this doorbell integrates properly with my present 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 as if an ideal job for Dwelling Assistant.
Here is the final todo checklist:
- Set up Dwelling Assistant
- Set up Dwelling Assistant Group Retailer
- This permits third occasion “untrusted” integrations instantly from GitHub. You will want a GitHub account and it will clone customized integrations instantly into your native HA.
- I additionally advocate 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 occasion integration for Dwelling Assistant
- NOTE: Unifi Shield assist 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 assist 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 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 referred to 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 too can 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 Companies, 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 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. Observe that your Entity names could also be totally different should you give your entrance doorbell digital camera a special title.
Discover the format of Knowledge, it is title worth pairs inside a single subject’s worth.
…but it surely additionally exists in a file referred to as Automations.yaml. Observe 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, marketing consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft worker. He’s a failed stand-up comedian, a cornrower, and a e book creator.
