Hello all!
This is my first post. I am rather new to Home Assistant, about 3 weeks in. My Home Assistant OS is running on a Geekom X86 mini computer, I have set up a tablet in my living room running POE as my Home Assistant Dashboard, and I got my Konnected board up and running (everything but the siren - still working on that).
Converting my old alarm sensors to a new Konnected Alarm Panel is what got me started on HA. From there I wanted an alarm “keypad”, and then discovered the array of Home Assistant Dashboards which got me hooked. I briefly tried Smart Things before HA, based on a youtube video I watched, explaining that Home Assistant was way more complicated than Smart Things, so I wanted to go the easier route, which was Smart Things. The thing was unhooked and sent back to Amazon Prime within about a week, I couldn’t stand it, which got me started on HA.
(Most) of my homes devices previously ran on Alexa. I have converted everything over to HA (with the exception of my Garage Door, which is a MyQ- and I’ve read the latest on the Integration - a topic for another day).
What brings me here today is I am looking for help with something. Basically, I am needing a “Button” that I can press that will temporarily disable certain Alexa Routines. Why? With my Konnected Alarm Panel - I have routines set up, that any time a door or window is opened, an Alexa routine is triggered, my Alexa Echo raises its volume to 6, states whatever was opened (ex., “Front Door”), then puts volume back down to a 2. On some of my other Alexa’s, I have similar routines minus the volume changing (for example, I have an Alexa out on my pool deck hooked to a large speaker for listening to music - I have additional routines to simply say whatever door/window was opened, and it will play at whatever volume the device was already set atm, rather than raising and lowering it so as not to interfere with audio levels while listening to music). I tried setting up voice playback initially in HA, however, the latency was unbearable. It was multiple seconds slow… Also, I could only play it on certain speakers that HA discovered, not my 3 Alexa’s I have throughout my home. The Alexa routines are very quick, they work, I like the voice - it just all works.
However there comes a time where it would be nice to temporarily disable those routines. When its late at night, and I may be making multiple trips inside and out, it would be nice to press a button/switch on my dashboard to temporarily mute those routines. That way I’m not accidently waking our 6 month old baby!! And it would be nice to set it as a TEMPORARY switch, for say 10 minutes or whatever, that way it goes back to normal and we still have the door “chimes”, if you will.
Thank yall in advanced for your help, its been a lot of fun getting started!
I am running the Alexa Integration for Home Assistant Cloud, if that helps. Also, in the Alexa app, there is a switch at the top of each routine, to “enable” or “disable” individual routines. What I need is to be able to do that through home assistant, multiple routines at once enabling or disabling.
Edit I do see a “Stop Audio” option under “Device Settings” when setting up an Alexa Routine… Perhaps I could create a Routine to do so, triggered by a button, or “Virtural Switch” maybe, from HA
