I found out Home Assistant supports Apple iCloud integration this weekend which supports to track devices and send “Find My” device alert to apple devices. I had quite a few apple devices for various usage and uses “Find My” app a lot as my devices are sometimes scattering around the house. So I integrated this into HA, connecting it to Lovelace for centralised management and also connect to Alexa integration using an automation. Now, when I say “Alexa, find Tai’s iPhone 8”. It will make my device to ring with a “Find My” alert. Very handy to locate apple devices without opening “Find My” app. I always find it is so fascinating that Home Assistant integrates products from different ecosystem together - as long as you can spend a bit time to put them together.
Let me know if you are interested in how I put things together and I can share my implementation.
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Here is my implementation. It mainly requires 2 things to configure:
- Install iCloud integration and create scripts to send “Find My” alert to your apple devices. Example can be found in here
- Port your script to Alexa integration and make your Alexa command to call the HA script entity. There are different ways to do it and my implementation might seem a bit complicated and limited but this is purely because I am using Emulated Hue for free Alexa integration. You may make it much easier using Nabu Casa Cloud integration but with $5 subscription while you can support HA development.
Given that Emulated Hue will port every HA entity as a light bulb to Alexa, the way I did is to make HA call certain script when a light bulb is set with certain brightness by Alexa.
-
Create a fake light entity using template light and create an automation that calls your HA script when this light entity set with different brightness. An code example can be found in here In this example, when
light.emulated_hue_ha_script
set with brightness 12%, it will callscript.find_tais_iphone_8
-
Port this fake light into Emulated Hue integration and discover this new device from Alexa. An example code can be found here. Now you should be able to see a light bulb called
HA script
in Alexa app. -
Make individual Alexa routine for each apple devices. For example, set a routine with “Alexa, Find Tai’s iPhone 8” as trigger, turn on
HA script
light bulb with brightness 12%. This will call the HA script that you configured to send your apple device a “Find My” alert.
N.B. If you are like me, not a native English speaker with accent, Alexa may not recognise your command perfectly - and it may ask you if you want to shop an iPhone When I looked at the Alexa voice history, I can see that it recognised my command from “Find Tai’s iPhone8” as “Find toys iphone eight”, “Find Thai’s iphone eight”, “Find tyson eight”. So I added these incorrect command into the routine triggers and it then worked perfectly.