Moving to home assistant due to specific use cases

I’m considering moving to home assistant due to the limited conditionality of most cloud based platform logic (Alexa/aqara etc). One specific use case has moved me closer to this today after an automation in the home that’s been working fine for months now refuses to work. I wonder, if I explain the automation purpose, if you could confirm this sort of thing is straightforward to achieve in home assistant? (It should be noted that I also have the desire for more local control over many of the smart home platforms I have installed in my home also)

So, I have an outdoor pergola with a slatted roof that can be opened or closed. Currently I have an aqara door sensor wired to a small rain sensor. When the sensor is closed, its expected that its raining and aqara sends a command to IFTTT that hooks into broad link to send an RF command to the pergola motor, closing the roof. When the sensor opens, its expected that rain has stopped, the Aqara routine does nothing unless the sensor has been open for over 15 minutes, if its still dry then when it next receives an open sensor trigger, it sends IFTTT a command to open the pergola by the same method. This latter part, sending a message if sensor open over x mins has stopped working, I suspect there’s some state issue in the data between Aqara and IFTTT given the 15 min delay.

This is the case so that should there by only light rain (drizzle) when the rain sensor may open and close rapidly, the roof isn’t constantly opening and closing but waits until its been dry for a little while.

Is this easily achievable in HA? I can do the closing part in any platform, but the ‘has it been open for 15 mins’ before sending the command is something I’ve only encountered to date in the Aqara automation logic.

Yes all of this can easily be done locally using Home Assistant.

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Thank you for the rapid response. Now then the challenge to find a R Pi 4 4GB (is 8GB really needed?)

4GB will be plenty.

2GB if you don’t expect to do much more than this - however, beware. Once started you will find much more to automate :slight_smile:

Just fyi these are the sort of automations you will make (made up entity_ids):

trigger:
  - platform: state
    entity_id: binary_sensor.rain_contact
    to: 'on'
action:
  - service: cover.close_cover
    target:
      entity_id: cover.pergola
trigger:
  - platform: state
    entity_id: binary_sensor.rain_contact
    to: 'off'
    for:
      minutes: 15
action:
  - service: cover.open_cover
    target:
      entity_id: cover.pergola
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