Which notification platform do you suggest?

[hoedha (Nurhuda Hendra Setyawan)]

Hi, just a head up for your coming to Bali. Currently several instant messaging system are blocked in Indonesia due to recent violence protest upon election result. Sadly, part of Telegram service is also blocked. You can still use chat as usual, but you can’t access web.telegram.org and api.telegram.org which is used by telegram component. So you will need to either use VPN or another notification system. This affects all of network carrier here and wifi providers. Not sure how long this partial blockage will last,

[SteveDinn]

I just wrote up a post about how to use Slack for notifications and why I moved to that platform. I previously used pushbullet and telegram.

How to get actionable notifications using Slack

How to get notifications working using Slack And how to perform actions in Home Assistant based on those notifications Why Slack? There are tons of ways to send out notifications from Home Assistant. Why is Slack now my preferred method? Because they have a free tier of service. Under their free plan, you get just about all the features of a paid plan, but you can only see your last 10,000 messages. That’s good enough for me. Most of my notifications are not useful past a day anyway. It’s e…

[PanMat (Pankaj)]

Hi Ben,

I checked out the repo of mqttwarn on github - click here.

But there are no examples of HA, Slack, Pushbullet, Pushover but there are examples of Alexa, Hiveeyes & Homie but I am not familiar with these platforms.

Please advise if there is another URL where HA specific examples are posted or if you do not mind please share how you got mqttwarn working with HA.

Thanks,

PS: This thread is from 2017 and possible that focus of mqttwarn may have changed, feel free to ignore this message if that is the case.

[sumnerboy (Ben Jones)]

I don’t use HA, I have mqttwarn integrated with openHAB, but the principle is the same. You define a series of notification MQTT topics, e.g. notification/info, notification/warn, notification/alarm etc, you pick what granularity you need.

Then in HA/OH you use the MQTT provider for your platform to publish messages to these topics whenever you want to notify something/someone. E.g. I have an OH rule that publishes a message to notification/info when my house alarm is armed or disarmed, and another one that publishes a message to notification/alarm if the alarm is tripped.

Then you setup mqttwarn to monitor you notification/xxx topics and configure which services you wish to be notified for each notification type. E.g. for /info I might just log the message to a Slack channel and log file, for /warn I might do the same as /info but also push a mid-priority Pushover notification to my phone, and for /alarm I also send high priority messages to both mine and my wifes phone via Pushover.

How/what and who you decide to notify is entirely decoupled from your automation platform. HA/OH just publishes the messages to the MQTT topics and mqttwarn handles all the routing and delivery of those messages to the endpoints.

Hope that help.

[PanMat (Pankaj)]

Ben, thanks for the detailed explanation…appreciate it and I am sure it will also help other folks who are just getting started with home automation projects.

Meanwhile, I got the push notification working on HA using SimplePush but noticed that most apps capable of providing notifications (including SimplePush) are also a huge drain on phone battery.

Did you encounter this problem or found a notification service that is more friendly on phone’s battery life?

[sumnerboy (Ben Jones)]

Nope - I use Pushover for most of my notifications and haven’t noticed any issue with battery drain (been using it for a number of years).

But that is the beauty of mqttwarn - if you find a notification service doesn’t work they way you want or has problems, you can switch to something else with a few lines of mqttwarn config - without touching your automation system.