I’ve cleaned up and documented my home notify setup as a new custom component - it let me rip out most AppDaemon code and get every automation down to a single notify call with no explicit targets. Plus the Frigate blueprint now sends me emails as well as mobile push, and I’ve replaced some common notifications with doorbell chimes and Alexa noises
YAML only for now, but lots of recipes to get going, like one to make Alexa whisper low priority notifications, or move a camera to a PTZ preset before attaching a snapshot to message.
This looks great on its face. I’m new to Home Assistant and honestly am a bit dismayed at the clunkiness of the notification system - especially the inability to notify a ‘person’ on whatever device they have easily (or at all). I took a first glance at the documentation for this, and tried to get a very simple notification going, but am sort of stuck. Is this the best place to discuss what I see as gaps in the documentation, or would that be better as issues on the github?
The notification system is undergoing changes because the old design does not fit well with the rest of the architecture. Notifiers are services, not entities and that does have consequences. These changes are quite invasive though, so that takes time. Add to that that various integrations may require very different things.
Having said that, there is no single way to link which notifiers to use for what person, because there are many ways to notify. Personally I have for instance push messages on my phone, ipad, watch, Signal messenger, … or you could cast it as spoken language to the nearest speaker based on room presence, which is an alltogether other way. I might even use e-mail.
The simplest ways to have more flexibility with the current workings are to use a script or a notifier group. I use scripts with parameters to add flexibility, because it also allows me to target casting devices etc. and send the same message to various combinations of persons. Or of course use the integration by the OP
Thank you. I guess my first initial use case is just as previously described - the ability to send a notification to one or more persons. For starters, I setup SuperNotify with just the ‘minimal’ example, and it appears notifications do go out to all the phones on the system. What wasn’t clear was the next step, and how I would then instead send a notification to just specific persons - via the target field, data field, etc. I didn’t see that in the recipe examples. I did just find the docs/usage folder on the github, which is I think what I was missing last night when first diving in. I think I landed on a dead link somewhere when going through the docs, and thought maybe the information just wasn’t there yet. I’ll try to find that dead link again so it can be fixed.
You can use ‘person.joe_smith’ as a target for the notification, as a single value or a list of person entities.
That will then limit the mobile push to only the devices associated with that person
There’s a ‘recipient’ diagnostic sensor created by Supernotify you can see in the Developer Tools entities tab, or the Settings | Entities view that will tell you exactly what mobile devices it thinks a person has.
All that works without any config since it discovers the person entities, the user entities and the mobile device actions and links them all together
