Home Assistant

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Back in February I read about Home Assistant on a TCF thread. At the time, before I knew a lot about it, I thought maybe it could be used to make the setup of my TiVo Control skill for Alexa a little easier. That turned out not to be necessarily true, but I did learn about proxying HTTPS requests through Lambda which was helpful for people who couldn’t host their own HTTPS server at home.

HA is written in Python and has a ton of components to contributed by the user community. The big automation players are here (Amazon Echo, Nest, IFTTT, Hue, etc.) plus a lot of smaller or lesser-known modules (like IKEA’s new TRÅDFRI light bulbs). You can mix and match these components by adding a new section to your configuration.yaml file with the required settings. With device location tracking you can set up automations with a basic trigger/condition/action setup.

Since most of my home automation is done via Z-Wave devices tied to my ADT Pulse system (which finally has some basic Amazon Echo support of its own), I haven’t played around with HA’s powerful features automation, control, and push notification features. For now, I’m using the iOS app to connect to my HA install. From there I can see the status of my Nest thermostat, view my Dropcam and TRENDnet cameras, and even control my web power switches from a single application dashboard.

 

4 Comments

  1. Really enjoying your sharing on Alexa and TiVo. Working on a Windows machine makes it hard. In spite of that have the testing website controlling my TiVO and have created a Skill at AWS. Now trying to configure Home Assistant for TiVO and not really knowing where to start. Wondering if you would share your TiVo config in HA? Thanks again. I’m thinking I’m going to get a Raspberry Pi to run HA. Actually I would be willing to hire you as a consultant to get this going. My buddy kidded me that I was going to all this trouble to avoid pressing buttons on my remote. Haha

  2. I don’t actually do any TiVo stuff through HA, sorry! I only stumbled upon it while I was trying to work on the TiVo Control skill for Alexa. I use it primarily as a dashboard for my cameras and network power strips as shown in the screenshots.

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