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 shortly grow to be a pastime that overwhelms you. Each object (entity) in your home that’s even remotely related can grow to be programmable. Every thing. Even individuals! You’ll be able to declare that any title:worth pair that (for instance) your telephone can expose might be consumable by Dwelling Assistant. Questions like “is Scott dwelling” or “what’s Scott’s telephone battery” might be related to Scott the Entity within the Dwelling Assistant Dashboard.
I used to be amazed on the gadgets/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, Mild Standing, positive, that is simple 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 perfect half? This all runs LOCALLY. Not in a cloud or the cloud or anybody’s cloud. I’ve acquired 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 organising Dwelling Assistant on a Pi is the perfect and best solution to get began. That stated, you may also 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 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 whenever you pressed the doorbell it will 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 quite a lot 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 onerous 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 Dwelling Assistant.
Here is the overall todo record:
- Set up Dwelling Assistant
- Set up Dwelling Assistant Neighborhood Retailer
- This permits third celebration “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 possibly can see what’s occurring.
- 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 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 Dwelling Assistant as “media gamers” and likewise 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 known as “all over the place.” Not solely as a result of it is good to have the ability to say “play the music all over the place” however you may also 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 Companies, attempt pasting on this YAML and clicking “name service.”
service: notify.alexa_media_everywhere
knowledge:
message: Somebody is on the entrance door, it is a check
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. Here is mine. I used the UI to create it. Word that your Entity names could also be completely different when you give your entrance doorbell digital camera a distinct title.
Discover the format of Knowledge, it is title worth pairs inside a single discipline’s worth.
…but it surely additionally exists in a file known 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
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.
