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

I’m not a Dwelling Assistant knowledgeable, 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 rapidly change into a passion that overwhelms you. Each object (entity) in your home that’s even remotely linked can change into programmable. All the things. Even folks! You may declare that any identify:worth pair that (for instance) your telephone can expose will be consumable by Dwelling Assistant. Questions like “is Scott house” 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 linked system you may have doubtless has an Integration obtainable.

Temperature, Gentle 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 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 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 organising Dwelling Assistant on a Pi is one of the best and best technique to get began. That stated, 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 principle level. I used to have an Amazon Ring Doorbell that will combine with Amazon Alexa and if 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.

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 outdoors companies, so this doorbell integrates properly with my current 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 Dwelling Assistant.

This is the overall todo checklist:

• 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 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 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 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 in addition permits you to 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 can too 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, strive 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. This is mine. I used the UI to create it. Be aware that your Entity names could also be completely different for those who give your entrance doorbell digital camera a unique identify.

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

…but it surely additionally exists in a file known as Automations.yaml. Be aware 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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