You can create your own wake word for Home Assistant’s voice assistant to enable voice control of your smart home.
Home Assistant
Home Assistant links
Home Assistant voice control with an Atom Echo
Home Assistant has it’s own voice assistant to voice control your home. Benefits are a local system and better control on the functionality. Our experience so far is much less hassle and much more functionality then with Google or Alexa.
Requirements are the Atom Echo, a cheap programmable microphone/speaker device and configuring/programming it via Home Assistant. The process is simple and explained in this article.
Home Assistant ideas
Article in which we capture ideas to implement in future in our Home Assistant instance. Links to websites or Home Assistant community posts with ideas for dashboards, automations, hardware projects etc. The links are categorised as much as possible.
How to name Home Assistant devices and entities?
A naming convention (scheme) is required in Home Assistant for devices and entities to maintain overview and support maintenance of your devices and setting op dashboards and automations. This article describes the naming convention we use.
Restoring a Home Assistant backup after failure
The nightmare of a Home Assistant owner is an unstable or completely crashing Home Assistant instance. Luckily it does not need to be a nightmare situation if you have a backup available of your Home Assistant instance. Restoring a Home Assistant backup is easy; it involves installing a fresh Home Assistant instance and restoring the backup.
Create a plant sensor card within Home Assistant
There are multiple options available to create a plant sensor card to include Xiaomi Flower Care plant sensor measurements for a Home Assistant dashboard. This article describes how to create a card by using the Lovelace Flower Card by Olen as this has a nice layout and extensive functionality.
This card can make use from the Open Plantbook database to fetch plant information via the OpenPlantBook integration. Additionally the Alternative Plant Component is used.
Integrating the Xiaomi Flower Care plant sensor with Home Assistant
Integrating the Xiaomi Flower Care plant sensor with Home Assistant is easy with the Xiaomi BLE integration. The Xiaomi plant sensor (also referred to as ‘Flower Care plant sensor from HHCC’, ‘HHCCJCY01’, ‘MiFlora sensor’) will be discovered automatically by Home Assistant.
When the plant sensor has been integrated successfully you can create Home Assistant Lovelace dashboards with plant information cards showing moisture, temperature, conductivity, brightness and the battery level of the plant sensor.
Home Assistant Dahua webcam dashboard including PTZ presets
A webcam, such as from Dahua, can easily be integrated into Home Assistant and opens the possibility to show life streams within Home Assistant.
If the camera is a so called PTZ camera (moving and zooming is possible) a dashboard card can be created which includes buttons to switch to predefined PTZ presets allowing to show specific views.
This article shows how to setup a dashboard card with the life stream and PTZ preset buttons.
Setting up Pushover notifications in Home Assistant
To receive notifications on your mobile phone the Pushover service can be used. It requires a Pushover account and the Pushover integration in Home Assistant. Some easy configuration is required before you can use Home Assistant Automations to sent automatically notifications.
Home Assistant garbage pickup notification
Home Assistant can be used to inform you about the garbage pick up dates / waste collection schedule on your dashboard. Within the Netherlands a lot of municipalities are using the AfvalWijzer website to inform their citizens which waste container/bin to put alongside the street.
Home Assistant dashboard card with garbage pickup dates
Home Assistant can be used to inform you about the garbage pick up dates / waste collection schedule on your dashboard. Within the Netherlands a lot of municipalities are using the AfvalWijzer website to inform their citizens which waste container/bin to put alongside the street.
How to add overview of triggered automations to a dashboard?
To monitor the triggering of Home Assistant automations a card can be added to a dashboard showing an overview of triggered automations in the past 24 hours. On a similar way a Lovelace UI dashboard card can be created to show disabled Home Assistant automations.