Apop's Home Assistant Setup and Other Resources

apop · June 4, 2019, 5:01am

I’ve had a few people asking for my Lovelace configuration, and it’s now in a pretty usable state, so I wanted to start this thread to share it. After wrestling with GitHub and learning a few things the hard way (thank goodness for snapshots), my config is now posted here:

My full configuration.yaml file, Lovelace configuration, and screenshots of my setup are all there. I hope it may provide some inspiration! I have a little cleanup to do with my AppDaemon scripts, but those will all be going into this repo soon as well. In the meantime, I have a second repo with a couple of AD apps that may be useful to the broader community, but I’ll be shutting the repo down when I move everything into the main repo. In the meantime, that AppDaemon repo is here:

I also have a few flows made with the Android app Automate that help my and my wife’s phones to interface with Home Assistant in various ways (presence detection, morning/night routines, etc.). I’ll be posting those as well once I’ve had time to anonymize them a bit.

Finally, my Home Automation blog is up and running. Technology and writing are two of my biggest hobbies, so I’m excited for the opportunity to join the two. I’m looking forward to sharing tips, tutorials, product reviews, etc. with the HASS community!

https://alex-p.com/blog

apop · June 4, 2019, 5:03am

AppDaemon App Repositories with HACS Support

STButton: A handler for SmartThings Buttons via the SmartThings integration or ZHA.
Nightmode: Lowers default brightness of lights during the night.
Whitenoise: A white noise machine for media player devices.
Config Check: Check your Home Assistant config and restart automatically if it’s valid.

hefal · June 4, 2019, 6:52am

thanks so much! would it be possible to post your dependencies from /local/custom-lovelace/ as a downloadable .zip? might take some time to fetch them all individually for the people who wanna try this out

apop · June 4, 2019, 12:52pm

Hey @hefal, I can include the custom cards code in my repo. My recommendation would be to get them all straight from the source, but I’ll update the readme with that information as well. I can get that all updated tonight.

apop · June 6, 2019, 4:54am

Just updated my readme file on GitHub. Tonight I finished moving most of my resources to use HACS (Home Assistant Community Store - I included a link to the setup instructions in the readme), so you can set that up so they will automatically download and update. There are a few custom files that are not set up in HACS that I haven’t uploaded yet, but I will be doing that soon.

apop · July 10, 2019, 4:20am

My Home Automation blog is up and running! https://alex-p.com/blog

The first few posts are going to be an introductory series on the smart home/home automation, but as I move along, it should be a good mix of topics to appeal to people of all skill levels: tutorials, frontend examples, automation examples, product reviews, and more. I’m also open to ideas for posts!

I’ve also got three AppDaemon scripts that I converted for use with HACS. Those apps are available in HACS by default, if you include AppDaemon in your HACS configuration. I’ll have more added soon as well!

david1 · July 10, 2019, 4:38am

What do you use for presence detection?

apop · July 10, 2019, 4:55am

I use the Android app Automate, which is similar to Tasker. Based on Wi-Fi connection state and then GPS location, I can reliably detect that I’m away within just a few blocks of leaving my home, and then generally as soon as I’m back in the garage when returning. Automate just sends HTTP requests to the Home Assistant REST API to call the device_tracker.see service, which I’ve posted about previously here. I’ve got plans to share all of the details of my presence setup in a future blog post.

david1 · July 10, 2019, 5:09am

oh i was hoping for room presence detection, similar to xandem

apop · July 10, 2019, 1:02pm

Gotcha. I do have plans to consider that in the future . I considered using my Google Home devices to do it since I already have them in most of the main rooms we use, but I’ve heard the functionality is somewhat flaky. If I do it in the future, it’ll probably be with ESP8266 devices.

apop · July 20, 2019, 3:46am

Config Check (AppDaemon)

I’m excited to announce the initial release of my Config Check AppDaemon app!

I’ve seen a few people around here asking for functionality to streamline the process of checking their configuration files and restarting Home Assistant, especially after some of the new additions to the Configuration menu pushed down the Check Config and Restart options on that page. This app will allow you to initiate a check of your configuration directly in Lovelace, and it creates a sensor that will tell you whether the configuration is valid (and why it failed if it’s invalid). Furthermore, the app will restart HASS automatically if your configuration is valid.

This has been tested successfully on my setup, so I’m ready to release it into the wild. Please check it out, put it through its paces, and log any issues on the GitHub repo! Full instructions can be found over there.

The app is also set up to work with HACS, though I’m not going to submit it to be in HACS as a default until I move it out of pre-release. For now, you can add the repository manually on the settings page. If you’ve never used AppDaemon before, and you’re hesitant to try this app because of it, don’t let that scare you off! Now that AppDaemon apps can be distributed by HACS, it’s pretty easy to set this up, especially on Hassio. Just install the AppDaemon add-on, and follow the steps in the HACS docs to enable AppDaemon support there. Then, add my repo and install the Config Check app, and all you have to do from there is add the three lines of App Config YAML to /config/appdaemon/apps/apps.yaml and complete the other steps in the readme.

Let me know if you have any questions, and happy config checking!

finity · July 20, 2019, 2:02pm

I was just about to write a long post about how I couldn’t get things working until i looked once more and had an AHA! moment.

I’ll post here to help any others who might get stuck where I was…

I use a non-hassio HA installed in Docker on a NUC running Debian (ie. not a RPi). I never had Appdaemon installed so I had to start from scratch.

Here are the instructions I followed to install Appdaemon in Docker:

https://appdaemon.readthedocs.io/en/stable/DOCKER_TUTORIAL.html

Everything went great with the test run and I moved on to creating a permanent install of Appdaemon.

After I got AD running I followed the install & config docs at @apop’s repo but for some reason I couldn’t get it to work.

I then realized that HACS was adding the check-config.py app files into it’s own appdaemon folder in the HA config directory and I had set up a completely different appdaemon docker config directory that I bound the “conf” directory to.

So to solve the issue and allow appdaemon to run HACS installed files in HA you need to bind the correct folder to the “conf” folder for AD. My HA config directory is found at “/home/finity/docker/hass-config” so you will modify the -v binding to “<your_HA_config_directory>/appdaemon:/conf”

Here is my docker run command that is working but you need to make sure you rename your path to the correct HA config directory:

sudo docker run -d --name="appdaemon" --restart=unless-stopped -p 5050:5050 -e HA_URL="http://<your_HA_IP:PORT>" -v <your_HA_config_directory>/appdaemon:/conf -v /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro -e TOKEN="<your_HA_AD_Token>" -e DASH_URL="http://$HOSTNAME:5050" acockburn/appdaemon:latest

Make sure you change the permissions on the appdaemon conf directory in the HA config directory to allow HACS to write that folder.

Holdestmade · July 20, 2019, 2:25pm

Thanks for this, I’ve created a picture elements card with this and the other “reload” buttons.

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apop · July 20, 2019, 3:07pm

@finity That’s great stuff! ~~Do you think you could submit that a PR with that information to the HACS documentation? Otherwise, I can put something together.~~~ I’ll put together a PR to add it to the documentation as I think it needs to go on a brand-new page and not an existing one, and there’s some other things I’d like to include.

@Holdestmade That card looks awesome! Do you mind if I add a screenshot of it to the README to show another example of the app in action?

finity · July 20, 2019, 3:33pm

Also, could you post the config you used?

While I’m not against oohing and aahing over a pretty card I think I’d find it more useful to actually add it to my config too.

finity · July 20, 2019, 3:45pm

Thanks!

finity · July 20, 2019, 4:14pm

I’ve been playing around a bit and forcing some errors to see the response.

It looks like the sensor will only show one error at a time. Is that true or am I missing something?

EDIT to add:

Also, in regards to the post above about putting the reload buttons for the different items (automations, scripts, etc) in a card got me thinking that there is a loss of advantage to those buttons/services because the app automatically restarts HA on every valid config check as opposed to the operator simply choosing to reload just the domains supported by a “reload” instead of a full restart.

Is there a way to have any kind of “are you sure?” step to acknowledge that a full restart is desired instead of a reload? That way if you say “no” then the process stops and you can just do the reload at your leisure instead of the immediate auto restart.

Holdestmade · July 20, 2019, 5:25pm

Or maybe button for check and then stop. Could easily add a restart button calling the restart service to Lovelace same way I’ve added the reloads.

Holdestmade · July 20, 2019, 5:25pm

Yes no probs

Holdestmade · July 20, 2019, 5:57pm

I commented out line 35 of checkconfig.py and changed my card to this. Now checks only and have a button for restarting

type: custom:vertical-stack-in-card
cards:
  - type: picture-elements
    image: /local/images/BG_blank_slim.png
    elements:

      - type: image
        image: /local/images/icons8-administrative-tools-80.png
        tap_action:
          action: call-service
          service: script.check_config
        style:
          top: 50%
          left: 10%
          width: 10%

      - type: image
        image: /local/images/icons8-restart-80.png
        tap_action:
          action: call-service
          service: homeassistant.restart
        style:
          top: 50%
          left: 26%
          width: 10%

      - type: image
        image: /local/images/icons8-source-code-80.png
        tap_action:
          action: call-service
          service: homeassistant.reload_core_config
        style:
          top: 50%
          left: 42%
          width: 10%

      - type: image
        image: /local/images/icons8-variation-80.png
        tap_action:
          action: call-service
          service: group.reload
        style:
          top: 50%
          left: 58%
          width: 10%
            
      - type: image
        image: /local/images/icons8-automation-80.png
        tap_action:
          action: call-service
          service: automation.reload
        style:
          top: 50%
          left: 74%
          width: 10%

      - type: image
        image: /local/images/icons8-note-80.png
        tap_action:
          action: call-service
          service: script.reload
        style:
          top: 50%
          left: 90%
          width: 10%


  - type: entities
    show_header_toggle: false
    entities:
      - sensor.config_result

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