<![CDATA[Category: Community | Home Assistant]]> 2016-03-21T19:41:07+00:00 https://home-assistant.io/ Octopress <![CDATA[Community Highlights]]> 2016-02-20T09:06:00+00:00 https://home-assistant.io/blog/2016/02/20/community-highlights Home Assistant land has been busy and a lot of people have been creating awesome stuff. We’ve added a cookbook section to the website full of examples how you can automate different things. Make sure you take a look and share your own recipes too!

Home automation demo by Part of the Thing

Haaska - Alexa Skill Adapter for Home Assistant

Haaska allows you to control lights, switches, and scenes exposed by your Home Assistant instance using an Amazon Echo. This is different from our own Alexa component because it will teach the Amazon Echo directly about the devices instead of teaching it to talk to Home Assistant. It will not allow you to use custom sentences but it will allow you to skip the ‘Ask Home Assistant’ part when giving commands:

  • “Alexa, set kitchen to twenty percent”
  • “Alexa, turn on evening scene”
  • “Alexa, turn off bedroom light”

Haaska on GitHub

Integrating Home Assistant with HomeKit

Contributor Maddox has created a plugin for HomeBridge, an open-source HomeKit bridge. This will allow you to control your home using Siri on your Apple devices. HomeBridge has recently restructured so you’ll have to install the plugin separately with the homebridge-homeassistant npm package.

Example config.json entry to load Home Assistant:

"platforms": [
    {
        "platform": "HomeAssistant",
        "name": "HomeAssistant",
        "host": "http://192.168.1.50:8123",
        "password": "xxx",
        "supported_types": ["light", "switch", "media_player", "scene"]
    }
]

HomeBridge on GitHub
HomeBridge Home Assistant Plugin

Custom alarm system with Home Assistant

User thaijames describes in the Home Assistant forums how he has created his own NFC-based alarm system using Home Assistant, DIY components and Garfield dolls.

Hold your NFC tag against the belly of Garfield to unlock the alarm.

]]> <![CDATA[Community Highlights]]> 2015-12-05T23:39:00+00:00 https://home-assistant.io/blog/2015/12/05/community-highlights From time to time we come along things that are worth sharing with fellow Home Assisters. Here a list of some cool stuff from last week:

First is the public beta of Let’s Encrypt. Let’s Encrypt is a new certificate authority that is free, automated and open. This means that it will now be very easy to secure your connection to Home Assistant while you are away from home. W1ll1am23 has written up a guide how to get started.

The next thing is a show-off of some of the cool stuff people do with Home Assistant. This is miniconfig talking to Home Assistant using the Amazon Echo!

And last but not least, Midwestern Mac did a microSD card performance comparison for the Raspberry Pi. If you’re using a Pi, make sure to check it out!

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