Home assistant send free message to mobile phone: what are options?

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Dear all:

I have installed a z-wave natural gas detector. I would like to use it to send a message to my mobile phone when natural gas is detected.

mu question to all of you is: what is the best/easiest way to get Home Assistant to send a free message to a phone?

My first instinct is to set up a xmpp server and send message to my free xmpp client on my mobile phone.

What are other options? or is there an easy to do this? xmpp server is actually not that easy to set up. If there a better way to do this, I am interested in different options

Thanks

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You might be able to send email to your phone as an SMS.

We use Bell Canada for our cellphones, and to email it is as simple send an email to @txt.bell.ca

If you search for “email sms (your cell provider)” you might find something similar.

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I find that Pushbullet works pretty well for this.

2 Likes
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I have now installed the free Telegram service and do like it a lot as I can send as many messages I want to a individual ppl or even groups… and it is damn fast … even supports sending Video-Snapshots taken from my surveillance feeds.

I have done all my automations with Node-red.

I really can recommend it

2 Likes
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Is it an iPhone or Android?

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it is on all platforms :+1: including a web interface

Telegram website

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@kngharv. Home assistant has it’s own persistent notification option that sends notification to you when you set a trigger but there are also other available options to easily do so. I prefer pushetta for this because it is really easy to use and it also can send images along with notifications which can be beneficial at times. This service requires Wi-Fi or mobile data.

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my question to you is, HA’s own persistent notification… what kind of client does it need? the HA app ?

i am trying to set up HA in such way that is as independent from 3rd party services as possible.

thanks

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Both Android AND iphone

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Have you got the official iPhone HA app installed ? I use that for all my notifications

1 Like
11

yes, I have official app installed on both anroid an iphone.

would you give me a pointer on how to fire a notification to a device?

thanks

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Have a look at this automation on my GH page. Living lights turn on depending on a light sensor. I get an iOS alert when this automation turns on the lights.

Link

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The HA persistent notification requires you to download the HA app on your device. Then you just need to add the persistent notification component to your automation and allow the HA app to send notification to your phone and then you will be good to go. @kngharv

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As mentioned, Pushbullet if you are using less than 100 messages per month. After that you require a subscription.

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I still prefer the telegram service , as it is completely free and even supports video and images to be sent and received

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HTML5 notifications are really good on Android.

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I wouldn’t mind seeing your code for the video snapshot please buddy.

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I have used the hass.io samples from Telegram support with picture and video

action:
  service: notify.NOTIFIER_NAME
  data:
    title: Send an images
    message: "That's an example that sends an image."
    data:
      photo:
        - url: http://192.168.1.28/camera.jpg
          username: admin
          password: secrete
        - file: /tmp/picture.jpg
          caption: Picture Title xy
        - url: http://somebla.ie/video.png
          caption: I.e. for a Title

and for video:

action:
  service: notify.NOTIFIER_NAME
  data:
    title: Send a video
    message: "That's an example that sends a video."
    data:
      video:
        - url: http://192.168.1.28/camera.mp4
          username: admin
          password: secrete
        - file: /tmp/video.mp4
          caption: Video Title xy
        - url: http://somebla.ie/video.mp4
          caption: I.e. for a Title
1 Like
19

Thanks pal!

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thanks. this is VERY useful.

I will give this a try, and this is going to help greatly on debugging the automation

harv