Utilizing Dwelling Assistant to combine a Unifi Shield G4 Doorbell and Amazon Alexa to announce guests

I’m not a Dwelling Assistant professional, nevertheless it’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 rapidly change into a pastime that overwhelms you. Each object (entity) in your home that’s even remotely related can change into programmable. Every little thing. Even folks! You’ll be able to declare that any title:worth pair that (for instance) your telephone can expose will be consumable by Dwelling Assistant. Questions like “is Scott residence” or “what’s Scott’s telephone battery” will 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 will have possible has an Integration obtainable.

Temperature, Mild Standing, positive, that is straightforward Dwelling Automation. However integrations and third celebration code may give you particulars like “Is the Dwelling Room darkish” or “is there movement within the driveway.” From these constructing blocks, you’ll be able to then construct your individual IFTTT (If This Then That) automations, combining not simply two techniques, however any and all disparate techniques.

What’s the very best half? This all runs LOCALLY. Not in a cloud or the cloud or anybody’s cloud. I’ve received 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 organising Dwelling Assistant on a Pi is the very best and best option to get began. That stated, you may as well 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’ll be able to 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 once you pressed the doorbell it could say “Somebody is on the entrance door” on our all Alexas. It was a stunning little integration that labored properly in our lives.

Nevertheless, I swapped out the Ring for a Unifi Shield G4 Doorbell for numerous causes. I do not wish to pump video to outdoors providers, so this doorbell integrates properly with my current Unifi set up and information video to a neighborhood arduous drive. Nevertheless, 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 listing:

Set up Dwelling Assistant
Set up Dwelling Assistant Neighborhood Retailer

This allows 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’ll be able to see what’s taking place.

Get the UniFi Shield third celebration integration for Dwelling Assistant

NOTE: Unifi Shield help 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 help for retrieving Digital camera feeds and Sensor knowledge 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 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 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 as well 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. Beneath Providers, attempt 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 check
  knowledge:
    kind: announce
    technique: converse

If that works, you understand you’ll be able to 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 digicam a unique title.

Discover the format of Information, it is title worth pairs inside a single discipline’s worth.

…nevertheless it additionally exists in a file known 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
    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, advisor, father, diabetic, and Microsoft worker. He’s a failed stand-up comedian, a cornrower, and a e book creator.

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