I was wondering if is any official or community plans for a Blueprints ‘marketplace’ or community ‘store’ as one common place where all users can share, find, and download reusable Blueprints as add-ons?
I know that initial (“not for production”) Blueprint support for has just been added and that more will be announced at the Home Assistant Conference but think the question about simplifying sharing is key.
I believe this is probably one of the first question people will ask for as easily sharing and finding all the shared Blueprints in the same place will really make them useful to more and give them added value.
Finding a Blueprint in a larger community forum alone is probably going to become next to impossible pretty fast. It also does not make the practical use-cases for quickly browse many topics with Blueprints harder, and surely make discovering new blueprints to only find ideas less than a pleasant experience.
PS: How about including a default “low battery” notification blueprint for all devices that use batteries?
I would expect something like a new category in hacs, but it’s not even been released yet so you’re going to need to wait for people to write blueprints they’re happy to share first.
I have a few ideas for shareable blueprints myself, but I’m not going to get to them anytime soon
I hope for a ‘converter’ to convert an existing, advanced, automation to a blueprint. Then, I guess, it will be (more) easy to share automations with the community. Don’t know if this will be possible.
The other night I was going through creating automations to alert myself and wife when certain sensors value change to a desired or undesired state. Was thinking it would be nice to have a threshold or good / bad value for a sensor which was coupled with a Alert when breached… similar to most NMS software.
Is this what blueprint solves?
Here are some use cases…
Send an alert to mobile if any of the door, window or garage sensors aren’t ‘closed’ when going to bed and triggering that routine.
Send an alert when a moisture sensor is not in the clear state
Send an alert when when a device can’t be reached or is offline (this is probably more of a core configuration one…)
It would be great to set parameters on a given sensor or entity and when those parameters are met ( too high, too low, etc) have a corresponding action like notify.
Which leads me to the thought of a reusable action like notify mobile phones with a variable for text… not sure if this is possible but have the message say …
I don’t think there will be a converter. The reason is, a blueprint looks like a normal automation but with placeholders for user configuration. There’s not any easy way to know what should be user configurable, nor is there any easy way to know what that item should have for a selector. So, this part of process sort of HAS to be manual. And, other than that, it’s just a normal automation with no conversion needed.
While people will, no doubt, create blueprints for something as simple as “when moisture sensor is not in the clear state, send a notification”, that’s not really where the power of blueprints lies. That’s a VERY simple automation that almost anyone could already create with the automation editor. Blueprints, I feel, are most useful when they create more complex automations with choose statements, delays, and wait triggers. Something more like “when X user arrives home and X door opens within X minutes of arrival turn on all the lights in X area and, optionally, play music on all media players in X area”. Or “after X time of day if this list of X motion sensors no longer show motion for X minutes, automatically set X alarm system into armed_home mode”
I understand that will likely be the way for v1, however, I hope and strongly suggest the Home Assistant core team consider different possible long-term centralized solutions that could simplify the sharing process and make it much easier for both those who want to share Blueprints and those who want to find a Blueprint.
Personally I think that the idea of wide-spread use of Blueprints in the Home Assistant community is the coolest concept since sliced bread, and I believe that the spread of blueprint use as a general practice for all users could be unnecessarily held up until a common marketplace that is available by default in Home Assistant become available and used by all.
Being a long time user of Kodi/XBMC I remember back to the olden days when all their add-ons/plug-ins were decentralized and only available through their forums or GitHub, and having add-ons/plug-ins disorganized like that made them very hard to find and impractical to share or collaborate on improvements.
Today it has the Kodi Add-on Manager which both allow users to manually install add-ons/plug-ins that they have downloaded separately as well as act as simple to use marketplace/store which makes it easy to find officially supported add-ons/plug-ins by default (from their official repository) and also allow users to optionally add inofficial add-ons/plug-ins repositories which can then be searched/browsed too.
The Add-on manager’s purpose is to manage the various add-ons to the Kodi application. It can be browsed like any other section and the various installed/uninstalled, enabled/disabled add-ons. In the Add-on manager you can also change the settings for auto update, notifications and search for installed add-ons by bringing up the slide in submenu (press left “<=” to show/hide). The Add-on manager is not where you go to run add-ons, but only to install and configure them.
I think that you could also compare this to how Thingiverse works for sharing of user-created digital design files of 3D-objects (in effect blueprints for 3D-printing) which can be downloaded, modify and even re-shared with a reference link to the original design so that you can easily find slight modifications of the original design files (blueprints).
Anyone else but me miss the official Marketplace for automations in the old SmartThings Classic app?
Well, I don’t actually miss it as such but I really miss the idea of a marketplace for finding reusable automations which can be installed with just a click or two. It was truly a simple and very user-friendly way to quickly get started with a few basic automations on the SmartThings platform.
The old Samsung SmartThings Classic app for iOS and Android had both an official “Marketplace” for automations (basically same as blueprints but called “SmartApps” in the SmartThings apps) as well as an “My Apps” section. The new SmartThings app for iOS and Android from SmartThings does still have a “SmartApps” section there is no real marketplace there any longer as only got a few official such smartapp automations.
FYI, independent developers lead by tonesto7 from the SmartThings community has since created a free and open source marketplace app store called “ST Community Installer” which allow for similar ‘one-click’ installation of a variety of community-developed SmartApps automations that are easy to use for simple tasks.
