With our new home, I have been diving further and further into home automation, and learning the coding of Home Assistant along the way. Unfortunately, it has a bit of a learning curve, so its not for the casual user, but after a bit of effort (and a lot of youtube videos) I have started to make some sense of it.
I have found that not everything is directly compatible – however, I am utilizing a combination of Amazon Alexa, Home Assistant, and a small piece of Z-Wave, which covers all of our devices and current needs. Smart home technology is a bit of a mix of support, but these three options give me enough to cover all the pieces, and still keep them talking to each other.
I may go into more detail in the future, but for now, the main one that I am liking is our door sensor alerts. Nothing too fancy, just a basic door open magnetic sensor. These tie into the system using Alexa, and announce directly if a door is left open. Very simple. Working with Home Assistant, I then use the same trigger to activate a scene, which in turn announces (mainly to the forgetful kids) that a door is still open, repeating until they take action. Once they do, it politely confirms with a Thank You.
This bit of logic required several layers of puzzling, mainly because if the door is only open for a few seconds, it shouldn’t say anything – otherwise it would announce every time the door was open. My solution within Home Assistant was a couple of variables, one to track the duration of the open condition, and one to track if an alert had been triggered.
With the base template, I then expanded this to a “door” sensor we attached to the mail box, and we now receive an alert when the mail is delivered – which saves us from having to go out in the cold to find an empty box, and alerts us to any late night activity at the mail box (whole different challenge in our neighborhood).
