I have a goal of controlling everything in my house with Alexa, and being able to give a single command that takes action on multiple devices. Here’s what I have
3x Echo Dot’s (receiving them in mail today)
Smartthings hub, controlling several leviton dimmers
Plex server (mentioning this as I noticed there’s a HA component for it)
Fire TV and Stick, Apple TV
I’m still figuring this all out but as it stands, I don’t think I could provide one “scene” command to control all these things with Alexa. As mentioned I’m getting the echo dots today so I couldn’t really test this out. I’m viewing Home Assistant as a gateway to control other different devices and hubs to pull it all together
So, given my setup, could I give Home Assistant a command such as “Alexa, I’m leaving to work” which could stop Sonos playing in any room, turn Nest to Away, turn off all lights and all entertainment devices? Or something like “Alexa, I’m having people over” which could turn everything upstairs off, group 2 of the sonos devices, automatically play a playlist, and turn on my receiver, TV and Xbox, and dim the lights only down stairs to 80%?
Also, I noticed that the raspberry pie is a popular option. If home assistant can work with harmony hub and smartthings, I’m wondering if I can install this on a virtual machine instead since I won’t need any Zwave or RF adapters
Yes, you can do all that and more. Scenes are generally used for lighting but can be used for other device types, plus you have the ability to use scripts from Alexa which can do pretty much anything.
The only caveat is that you might have to say “Alexa tell homeassistant I’m leaving for work” (actually “homeassistant” can be any trigger word you specify") - the built in support in Alexa for smart homes is a little limited,
Regarding the VM question - you should be fine as long as you run a well supported OS such as Ubuntu or Debian.
I have a very similar setup as you and just started using Home Assistant last month and must say it works great and would totally recommend it. I’m just in the process of building scenes with Home Assistant, but in the meantime I’ve been using Yonomi with Alexa. I opted for the easier “emulated hue” Alexa-HA setup and I find that sufficient for my needs, vs the more complicated building your own Alexa Skill.
Here’s a few other potential issues you may run into:
I never got Plex to work. For some reason only the web player would show up and not the Home Theatre. Will try again but for now I use Kodi and Chromecasts.
Apple TV has basically no support. If you ever find a way to do it, let me know.
Harmony Hubs have no direct support, but I got it working using Maddox’s API and an MQTT broker. He recently added multiple hub support
I started to find a solution to communicate Home Assistant with Apple TV and I found a way. A library write in Python that promote a remote airplay control.
This could permit to use i.e. VoiceRSS (as Home Assistant extension – url: home-assistant.io/components/tts.voicerss/ ) to play audios (Text-To-Speach) or remote videos, musics and all, using this library or their command line shell.
We need to write a wrapper for that in Home Assistant for use this like a service. I planning to start this development after I read a little more about how to dev to HASS and Python (I develop in many other languages, but I’m a beginner with python).
If you ever find a way to do it, let me know.