My Home Assistant configuration

Feel free to use whatever you find here for your own Home Assistant or other home automation.

Use Cases

Includes automations for the following use cases:

• ⚡ smart lights:
  • Changing color temperature automatically based on time of day and of year 🐍
  • Turning lights on and off based on motion 🐫
  • Multi-stage wake-up light sequence, interruptable 🐫
  • Turning lights off while away from home 🐫
  • Putting lights in vacation mode, prompted when an appropriate calendar event is detected 📆 🐫
• other:
  • Reminders for when the washing machine is finished can be scheduled through a button next to the washing machine ⚡ 🐫
  • The admin user is prompted when there are available updates 🐍 📱

Components

I use the following components to implement this

Devices

• 1 Raspberry Pi 4B 4GB with Home Assistant OS
• 1 WD Green 2.5" SATA SSD 120GB, connected with a Startech USB 3.0 to SATA 2.5" adapter
• ⚡ Phoscon ConBee 2 Zigbee USB gateway
• ⚡ Zigbee devices:
  • 10 IKEA Trådfri lights (not RGB, but white spectrum 2200 K to 4000 K)
  • 6 IKEA Trådfri remotes with 5 buttons each
  • 1 IKEA Trådfri wireless control outlet
  • 1 IKEA TrådFri on/off remote
  • 1 IKEA TrådFri motion sensor

Integrations

• ⚡ deconz for Zigbee connection to smart lights, switch and buttons
• Telegram bot for 2-way communication, not limited to the local network
• 📱 The Home Assistant app for other notifications
• 📆 Google for the Calendar

Add-ons for automation logic

• Standard HA YAML (rhymes with 🐫) still has many of my automations, but I intend to move the bigger ones to one of the other platforms:
• Node-Red for flow-based automation
  • Contains all functions of all ⚡ buttons
• 🐍 AppDaemon for more programmatic automation using Python
  • Contains complex time logic
  • and the programmatic update notification logic

Add-ons, other

• ⚡ The deconz instance for the Zigbee network
• Some utility add-ons:
  • VS Code in front-end in browser
  • Samba share for easy access to the machine file from Windows pc

Node-Red demo

Node-Red is a simple yet powerful flow-based automation framework, but sharing what you're doing with it on Github can be difficult, because the json format is not human-readable.

So I decided to take some screenshots of my flows, and show a bit of code.

Main buttons flow in Node-Red

I do 3 things with buttons: "normal" buttons that control lights, a button to set reminders next to the washing machine, and bedroom-specific things like turning off all lights in the evening, or interrupting the wake-up lights sequence in the morning.

Especially interesting to share in this, is the first node on the left. It contains the code I have pasted here and decouples the specific codes of the buttons from the logic of my automations.

Wake-up lights flow in Node-Red

This flow toggles and monitors an input_boolean in HA to indicate whether the wake-up lights sequence is, and should be, in progress. The total duration is set in another input in HA, and divided by the number of transitions of ⚡ bulbs to set the transition per bulb. At the end, a switch is used to turn on a very bright white light.

Resources

To get started with Home Assistant, and for the documentation, visit: https://www.home-assistant.io/getting-started/

To see how other people have been using Home Assistant, have a look at the forums: https://community.home-assistant.io/