Hi everyone. Over the holiday break I wrote a plugin for Opsdroid to allow you to write automations for Home Assistant with it.
Opsdroid is an open source Python automation framework for building bots that I’ve been working on in my spare time for a few years. It is built on an event flow model where events are created by an external service, often by a user saying something in a chat client. The events can then be parsed using various AI services to add additional context and finally user defined Python functions called Skills can be triggered as a result.
I’ve built the Opsdroid Home Assistant plugin to allow you to bridge the two projects so that state changes in Home Assistant can trigger Skills in Opsdroid and then Opsdroid can make service calls back to Home Assistant to change states of devices. This enables you to write automations in Python allowing you to define simple and readable automations.
This is very similar to AppDaemon but there are a few differences which I’ve tried to write up in the documentation. AppDaemon is great and I’ve been using it in my own set up for a long time. I think this project will just give folks another option and perhaps tighter integration into natural language processing and ChatOps if they want to explore that.
It’s early days for this plugin. I’ve been running it in my home setup for a little while but I would really love it if folks would try it out and give me some feedback! Here’s a link to the Opsdroid blog where you can find more info.