Home automation relies on ‘senses’ to be able to understand the situation and apply your rules to. Home Assistant achieves this through Integrations. Devices have entities which need integrating to Home Assistant in order to take advantage of them.
A quick example: Android IP Webcam (available through the Play Store) can be integrated into Home Assistant through the ‘configuration.yaml’ file. In this case there is an old Android phone with a static IP on the local Wi-Fi network running the IP Webcam software.
android_ip_webcam:
- host: 192.168.10.100
port: 8080
name: 'Cam 1'
sensors:
- battery_level
- battery_temp
switches:
- torch
- video_recording
Add the above configuration and restart Home Assistant to enable two sensors and two switches. The Home Assistant integration documentation shows all the available sensors.
Generally speaking integration devices are going to either connect directly to the host running Home Assistant or wirelessly. When you work out what kind of home automations you want to achieve you can then work out what solutions are going to be best. In this series the simple idea of automating the light switches to not need to manually ever switch a light on or off is the initial goal.
There is loads of choice when it comes to wireless devices that you can connect for home automation. If you are trying to do this in a complete cloud free way it can be tricky, so many systems come with their own cloud account to allow you to remotely manage. This is unnecessary with Home Assistant as this acts as the ‘cloud’ for your home automation giving you one interface to control everything. So you just need to have the devices connect to Home Assistant and then only allow access to Home Assistant externally via a web browser and/or the mobile app. This external and mobile access will be covered in a mini-stride soon, it can also enable your phone as a location tracker for automation.
For this guide and setup it was decided upon utilising Z-Wave wireless mesh technology over Wi-Fi to completely eliminate the potential for cloud based connected devices, ensuring the system will still operate and be locally controllable without Internet connectivity. This requires a Z-Wave hub or controller to manage the mesh network that the devices form.
Next: Step 8: Entities