I’ve set up HAOS on an old Mac mini. Running great. I don’t have any smart gadgets yet. Hope to get some soon. Set up Home Assistant Cloud (will gladly pay $65.00 a year for support) works great home and away..
I’ve been watching YouTube videos. Can’t find anything simple. I’d like to do the following:
Setup smart phone (mine and wife).
Setup Home proximity. I thought I set it up, but were both home and both distance’s say 5800 ft.
Setup proximity for grocery store, work, Mom’s house.
Have an indicator on Dashboard showing where we are.
Send a message to me when either of us arrive at one of the locations.
Any other magic I can do with Home Assistant with just two smart phones, 2 iPads and a computer.
I’m a retired IT guy. So I can follow most computer languages. I’d like to recommend HA, but most of my current friend have no IT skills.
I have already installed HACS
What do you mean by this… “setting up” a phone for HA can mean anything from just downloading the companion app and logging in to a detail description of every sensor sensor setting.
The companion app on your phones will provide pretty accurate locations. Make sure to set your phone to ‘always’ allow location of the companion app.
You can the locations show in HA and create zones for the grocery store and your Mom. And you can create automations to send you a message when you or your wife have arrived or leave a location.
Thanks, I forgot. I addition to setting up HAOS on the Mac mini and getting the web part working with HA Cloud. I installed the companion app on the two phones and an iPad.
I followed a YouTube tutorial on how to set a thermostat. I tried to use that to send a message to my pixel 9a whether the house was empty or not, but it failed. Still debugging it. I have a smart light I bought with an Alexa echo. I got that into HA. I setup an automation to send a message to my Pixel 9a when the light turns on.
I’m looking for some Newbie tutorials to show me how to know where my phone is (for me or my wife) and send me a text (or message to my Pixel 9a) with the time, where I am, who I am (me or wife). Not much shows on the Dashboard but weather.
If I could see some simple automations that did stuff with the smart phone and displayed a variable (like date, time, status, who), I could figure out where the list of variables are. I’m sure there are system variables also. Just haven’t found them. Doing a lot of Google searches.
So the first step is to use what everyone has (smart phone, tablet) and get some cool stuff working on Home Assistant.
Someone replied earlier and said if the Companion app was installed I could see where I was, but I can’t even figure that out. Once I have that I could set my home location and maybe get “Anybody Home” automation working.
Again, Home Assistant Newbie. Point me to a beginners “You can do this with just Home Assistant and a smart phone”.
Found the Zones under Areas, labels & zones. I set Stein Home to the City name and the lat and long are wrong. Hoped edit would let me enter an address. Nope. Only Lat., Long. and Radius. I can get that on Google maps.
Thanks, Got my zone problem fixed.
Setup 4 zone. Home, Kids Home, Kroger Main and Kroger South. Got the Lat. and Long. from Google Maps (had to right-click the pin). Can someone explain Passive zone? I set the Stores to passive.
This advice is given regularly to users referring to YT: they can be outdated/wrong so it’s not the best source.
HA is evolving quite a lot and constantly so you better use the official docs (or the forum)
The location setting on the HA Companion App is pretty good. Make sure to set (and keep) the location settings for the App to ‘always’. On HA use ‘Zones’ for home and grocery store etc.