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 change into a passion that overwhelms you. Each object (entity) in your home that’s even remotely linked can change into programmable. Every little thing. Even folks! You may declare that any title:worth pair that (for instance) your cellphone can expose might be consumable by Dwelling Assistant. Questions like “is Scott dwelling” 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 gadgets/objects that Dwelling Assistant found that it may automate. Lights, remotes, Spotify, and extra. You may discover that any internally linked machine you will have seemingly has an Integration out there.
Temperature, Mild Standing, certain, that is simple Dwelling Automation. However integrations and third occasion code can provide 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 personal IFTTT (If This Then That) automations, combining not simply two programs, however any and all disparate programs.
What’s one of the best 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 consider establishing Dwelling Assistant on a Pi is one of the best and best solution to get began. That mentioned, 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 (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 primary level. I used to have an Amazon Ring Doorbell that may combine with Amazon Alexa and whenever 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 Defend G4 Doorbell for a lot of causes. I do not need to pump video to exterior providers, so this doorbell integrates properly with my present Unifi set up and information video to an area exhausting 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 overall todo checklist:
- Set up Dwelling Assistant
- Set up Dwelling Assistant Group Retailer
- This allows third occasion “untrusted” integrations instantly from GitHub. You may 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 taking place.
- Get the UniFi Defend third occasion integration for Dwelling Assistant
- NOTE: Unifi Defend assist 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 assist 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 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 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 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. Beneath Companies, 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:
kind: announce
methodology: communicate
If that works, you realize 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. Notice that your Entity names could also be completely different when you give your entrance doorbell digicam a special title.
Discover the format of Information, it is title worth pairs inside a single discipline’s worth.
…but it surely additionally exists in a file referred to as Automations.yaml. Notice 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
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 guide creator.
