HomeHub: moving to Home Assistant

Bye HomeHub

We left the HomeHub story running heimcontrol.js with home made plug-ins for the opentherm gateway and RFXcom. I say running but it was crashing all the time. Months passed without running anything, I couldn’t be bothered resetting the node.js application every time it decided to quit on me. Frustrated and disappointed the whole thing was pushed on the I’ll get to it when I feel like it track. In this case it took about a year to do anything else.

But revenge is a dish best served with good intentions 😉

Re-ignite

During a visit to the open door day @revspace and walking around talking to people, there was one man typing on a notebook, editing a configuration file and checking a webpage. It suspiciously looked like home automation software due to all the things labeled with names like living-room, kitchen, curtains and lights. One inquiry later I had learned this piece of software was called home assistant and that it was an open source package for home automation with a solid userbase and lots of plug-ins ready to go. Color me intrigued! This might just be what I was trying to achieve with all that old shit at home.

Everything’s coming up (mil)house

Time to dust of that RFXcom and hook up that opentherm gateway, there’s a new kid in town and he is very easy going.
Setting up my coco light switches with the RFXcom only took me 10 minutes, holy smokes, this system is awesome!
The opentherm gateway took a bit longer but ultimately with a little help from the community that also integrated well. My solution can be found here.

That’s 2 for 2, this was going well. Time to go full throttle and find out what else I can cook up.

How about automatically turning off all the lights whenever I leave home? Yep, that can be done. I needed to add some sort of presence detection for this. Following the getting started guide luckily already covers that topic so settings that up was also a breeze. I opted for the owntracks route. Setting up zones for my home, work, my moms, my sister’s and my brother’s place, because why not? 🙂
Next I setup the automation:

# Turn off lights when everybody leaves the house
  - alias: 'Away Mode'
    initial_state: True
    trigger:
    - platform: state
      entity_id: group.all_devices
      from: 'home'
      to: 'not_home'
    action:
      service: light.turn_off
      entity_id: group.all_lights

After that I turned on all the lights and went to my mom, whiped out my phone, logged in and checked the states. All lights turned off!