[kwlug-disc] Home Assistant miscellany

[Khalid Baheyeldin]

Some of the stuff that was mentioned in my talk last night ...

PicoTTS: a very capable Text to Speech

$ sudo apt-get install libttspico-utils

$ pico2wave -w x.wav hello
$ aplay x.wav

As a general rule: you can integrate anything with Home Assistant, if you
can get an MQTT message from its device. This can easily be done with an
ESP8266 (~$4 and up) or an ESP32 (~$8 and up).

Components of Home Assistant
https://www.home-assistant.io/components/

And the documentation is adequate
https://www.home-assistant.io/docs/

For door lock support in Home Assistant, there are many (mostly commercial
products which tend to be very expensive, and/or have a 'cloud' component,
with all the issues surrounding that: privacy, data collection, loss of
service)

https://www.home-assistant.io/components/#lock

If you can get a regular door lock working with a microcontroller, you can
add MQTT over WiFi, and that will work.

Detecting people's presence (via phones), can be done using several ways
(check the 'Presence' components on the web site), for example, you can use
Bluetooth Low Energy
https://www.home-assistant.io/components/device_tracker.bluetooth_le_tracker/

Combined with Device Tracker
https://www.home-assistant.io/components/device_tracker/

IFTTT is supported, but again it is a cloud service, and that means there
can be outages, ...etc. Instead, use custom Automations within Home
Assistant do most of what you want without relying on a outside service.


-- 
Khalid M. Baheyeldin
2bits.com, Inc.
Fast Reliable Drupal
Drupal optimization, development, customization and consulting.
Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability. -- Edsger W.Dijkstra
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. -- anonymous
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