Recommend relevant blueprints when creating automations

Feature Requests
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1

Like the title says, I think it would be amazing if Home Assistant could recommend blueprints off what integrations / devices you’ve installed.

I did some analysis of the blueprints exchange forum posts and found some cool things:

  • Many zigbee & zwave remotes have at least one blueprint
  • There are numerous blueprints for every type of domain (zone, media_player, climate, light, etc)
  • Not so much abundance exists for integrations (at least by looking at selectors which limit themselves to a particular integration), but the mobile_app integration does have many many blueprints

All that means there are enough blueprints to be able to build a simple recommendation engine. Let’s say I’ve just set up an Aqara Magic Cube via Zigbee. Home Assistant can recommend one of the blueprints. Or maybe I’ve just set up a camera. Home Assistant can recommend one of the send-me-a-snapshot-when-something-happens blueprints.

These recommendations need a place to be shown, and I think the create automations dialog would be a great place, such as in the mockup below I made:

Before after
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The idea is the dialog shows your blueprints (what’s currently a dropdown) on the left and community blueprints on the right. Until there’s some sort of blueprint store (I love this feature suggestion for the store!), the links on the right could take you to the forum post with the blueprint.

This dialog will need to scroll (unless you have disabled the cloud integration, in which the nlp automation description is gone and everything might fit: see image blow). Underneath “Popular Blueprints” I’m thinking there could be a “show more” button that will list blueprint recommendations for all your devices.

Mmm
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I started a discussion for how such a recommendation engine might be part of Home Assistant here: Sourcing blueprint information from the forums · Discussion #601 · home-assistant/architecture · GitHub. I really like the idea of manual creation—for instance every release there’s a new set of featured blueprints instead of showing the most popular ones—but then somebody has to be willing to do that curation.

2

Nice idea, but I find many half baked ideas in blueprints.

For example (and this was the first one I picked at random) without picking on or criticising this particular one, Aqara Opple 2 Buttons For Zha

Why is this restricted to ZHA? The buttons work in whatever zigbee integration you use.

Why is this even restricted to zigbee? Zwave buttons behave similarly.

Why is this restricted to the 2 button Opple? The four button and the six button work the same.

Until Blueprints become more generic, it is (IMHO) too much of a mishmash.

3

It would be great to see blueprints to become more generic, but it seems that everyone has responded by creating more blueprints, one for every slightly different configuration.

For your Aqara Opple Example, there exist 2, 4 and 6 button versions for ZHA, as well as the equivalent for deconz, so choosing one to recommend would not be a problem.

I published the list I generated of devices supported via blueprints here: Home Assistant blueprint devices - Pastebin.com. There’s a lot of configurations!