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I’m not a Residence Assistant professional, however it’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 develop into a interest that overwhelms you. Each object (entity) in your home that’s even remotely related can develop into programmable. All the pieces. Even individuals! You’ll be able to declare that any identify:worth pair that (for instance) your cellphone can expose might be consumable by Residence Assistant. Questions like “is Scott residence” or “what’s Scott’s cellphone battery” might 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 may automate. Lights, remotes, Spotify, and extra. You will discover that any internally related gadget you might have seemingly has an Integration obtainable.
Temperature, Gentle Standing, certain, that is straightforward 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 individual IFTTT (If This Then That) automations, combining not simply two methods, however any and all disparate methods.
What’s one of the best half? This all runs LOCALLY. Not in a cloud or the cloud or anybody’s cloud. I’ve obtained 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 consider establishing Residence Assistant on a Pi is one of the best and best technique to get began. That stated, 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 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 while 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 a variety of causes. I do not wish to pump video to outdoors companies, so this doorbell integrates properly with my present Unifi set up and information video to a neighborhood laborious 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.
Here is the final todo record:
- Set up Residence Assistant
- Set up Residence 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 suggest 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 assist 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 assist 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 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 too can goal that “All over the place” group in Residence Assistant.
Go into your Residence Assistant UI at http://homeassistant.native:8123/ and into Developer Instruments. Beneath Providers, strive 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
technique: converse
If that works, you already know 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 totally different when you give your entrance doorbell digital camera a distinct identify.
Discover the format of Information, it is identify worth pairs inside a single discipline’s worth.
…however 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
knowledge:
knowledge:
kind: 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 creator.
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