Hi all
been working with Home Assistant for a couple of years now and have a fair few integrations going along with a floor plan and card entities for controlling via a tablet, Also the majority of my place is based on ZWave relays for my lights and curtains and other devices from a Fibaro controller.
Where I am now, is that I want to start moving some of my schedules over to Home Assistant and probably Node-Red. Setting up the timer to open and close the curtains is something that I can work out, however, I want to be able to have the ability to do two things:
have the ability for a guest to disable the automation or update the times with ease, so I guess an entity or something within one of the cards to turn on and off the node-red automation somehow? would this be a logic function within the flow?
have the ability to change the times by interacting with Alexa, maybe as part of a good night routine.
A big ask for my first post I realize but Im looking for some feedback before I start digging too much to make sure that Node Red is the right way to go.
It sounds like you may be more advanced than I am, but I can answer the part of your question about disabling an automation in Node Red. I have two ZWave smart locks and created a NR flow so that when either is locked, the other will lock too. Likewise for unlocking. But if, say, a contractor is coming I might not want to give them access to both spaces.
I created an input boolean in HA and put it on a Lovelace card. In NR, I made a flow that looks for a state change in the input boolean and assigns true or false to a NR global variable. In my lock flow, I then put a switch node in line that lets the flow continue only if the global variable is true. The effect is that if the variable is turned on in HA, the lock automation is disabled. Pretty easy.
It seems that you should be able to use a similar technique using different input integrations to update the times, but I haven’t tried that myself.
Honestly, I ended up using the built-in automation’s within Home Assistant and create a Date and Time input helper, this is then displayed on the card so that the guest can change the times. This seems to work quite well. however, I will look at the switch node as it seems I will need to learn this node for a lot of the node-red flows - still new to node-red.
For the Alexa part, this is still something that I’m working on, unfortunately, I only get a few hours a week and I’ve just spent that tie doing the NEST integration and Samsung TV… I have a long list of projects…