I’m not a Residence Assistant professional, nevertheless it’s clearly a large 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 rapidly develop into a passion that overwhelms you. Each object (entity) in your home that’s even remotely related can develop into programmable. All the pieces. 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 dwelling” 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 gadgets/objects that Residence Assistant found that it may automate. Lights, remotes, Spotify, and extra. You may discover that any internally related system you might have doubtless has an Integration out there.
Temperature, Mild Standing, certain, that is simple Residence Automation. However integrations and third occasion code may give 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 techniques, however any and all disparate techniques.
What’s the most effective half? This all runs LOCALLY. Not in a cloud or the cloud or anybody’s cloud. I’ve received 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 imagine establishing Residence Assistant on a Pi is the most effective and best option 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 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 primary level. I used to have an Amazon Ring Doorbell that might combine with Amazon Alexa and if you pressed the doorbell it might 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 numerous causes. I do not need to pump video to outdoors providers, so this doorbell integrates properly with my present Unifi set up and information video to a neighborhood 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 Residence Assistant.
This is the overall todo checklist:
- Set up Residence Assistant
- Set up Residence Assistant Neighborhood Retailer
- This allows third occasion “untrusted” integrations straight from GitHub. You may 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 taking place.
- Get the UniFi Defend third occasion integration for Residence Assistant
- NOTE: Unifi Defend help is being promoted in Residence Assistant v2022.2 so you will not want this step quickly because it’ll be included.
- “The UniFi Defend Integration provides help for retrieving Digital camera 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 Residence 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 “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 Residence Assistant.
Go into your Residence Assistant UI at http://homeassistant.native:8123/ and into Developer Instruments. Underneath Companies, strive pasting on this YAML and clicking “name service.”
service: notify.alexa_media_everywhere
information:
message: Somebody is on the entrance door, it is a take a look at
information:
sort: announce
technique: converse
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. Word that your Entity names could also be totally different in case you give your entrance doorbell digicam a special identify.
Discover the format of Information, it is identify worth pairs inside a single area’s worth.
…nevertheless it 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
information:
information:
sort: 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, marketing consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft worker. He’s a failed stand-up comedian, a cornrower, and a guide writer.
