Monitor multiple properties from iOS

Mobile Apps Home Assistant Companion for Apple
1

Hi there,

Please excuse me if this has been posted before but a search doesn’t bring it up.

We don’t have any Smart Home/HA devices at present but thinking of getting a Sonos One for the kitchen so I can say that I’m off to work and cameras, sensors etc can be armed (which we don’t have). Oh and play the local radio station for the dogs!

I’m looking into HA and was wondering whether I could:

  1. Monitor my house and the in laws house using the same instance of iOS HA on my iPhone? So we can receive push notifications.

  2. Manage the configuration of each property separately (or do I use LoveLace on the web for that?)

  3. Send the “She’s still OK” notification to both the wife and myself when her Mum turns on the kettle (or whatever - just so we can make sure she’s OK)?

Also I heard on the podcast someone mentioning TensorFlow for object/person identification. What sort of computer would I need to be able to happily manage that?

Cheers and thanks in advance,

Grahame

2

Hi,

the answer to your questions is yes. Theoretically all of these are possible with HA. However if you want to manage two or more different houses from the same HA instance, some networking stuff needs to be involved to create a virtual LAN and put all the entities on the same HA ‘network’. Maybe a more professional guy will correct me if I am wrong.

If you want to manage each property separately you can just build two separate HA network one for each house. The Lovelace interface on the web is available from anywhere and it’s the same as you have in your iOS HA application. If you manage the properties separately you will have two Lovelace interfaces. If you decide to put everything into one system with the virtual LAN, then you may use only one HA config and interface for everything.

Notifications based on anything is not a problem.

3

Thanks for getting back to me so quickly!

I’ll have to have a chat with the chap at work about setting up a virtual LAN for that. Would that mean all the devices would need to be prefixed with “Our-House” and “In-Laws-” so we can identify them from HA in iOS?

Cheers,

Grahame

4

Hi, thought I would pipe in:

  1. Monitor my house and the in laws house using the same instance of iOS HA on my iPhone? So we can receive push notifications.

→ Get 2x Raspberry PI’s (one for each house), you can then join the instances together via the API’s for the sensors you need to share between the 2

  1. Manage the configuration of each property separately (or do I use LoveLace on the web for that?)

→ If you follow my advice in 1 above, this will be easy.

  1. Send the “She’s still OK” notification to both the wife and myself when her Mum turns on the kettle (or whatever - just so we can make sure she’s OK)?

→ All possible with notifications and a multitude of notification platforms are supported…

I would not bother with the networking stuff unless you are really cofortable with this. You can cause yourself some real headaches as your experience in using HA grows… just use the DuckDNS addon on both instances and you will have a fixed address of each RPI…