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Automations
It's a couple of months now since I took the plunge into the rabbit-hole that is Home Assistant. I have a lot of automations set up - some useful, some just for the fun of it. It has been more interesting than I thought it would be and tying together the Amazon Alexa side and the Home Assistant side has been easier than I thought it would be. Some highlights: Alexa to Home Assistant (and vice versa) fairly well linked now Physical switches now in most, if not all, rooms. This makes the system much easier for naiive users and visitors SolarPV system now has more spohisticated operation based on kWh pricing ZigBee/WiFi now split about 60/40. With light bulbs as active repeaters, the ZigBee mesh is reasonably solid Automatic rebooting of the Solar Assistant Raspberry Pi when it crashes Extra fans, temperature controlled, on the SolarPV inverter Optional (switch-controlled) Washing machine and Dishwasher "Finished" announcements based on operating curr...
No, YAML ain't, but what is it?
YAML is said to stand for "YAML Ain't a Markup Language". This unhelpful acronym (and brazen use of the old "GNU = GNU is Not Unix" joke) doesn't really help in understanding YAML as it pertains to Home Assistant. Well, in this context, YAML is a way of defining the hierarchical configuration settings that drive Home Assistant. So, suppose we have some settings such as: Lights: Left: Brightness: 4 Colour: "Red" Right: Brightness: 6 Colour: "Green" Fans: Extractor: 2 YAML is just the thing to define such a hierarchical structure. For the moment, don't worry too much what these might represent. Consider, however, that we might want the actual settings (such as 4 or "Red") to be controlled by some variable quantity derived from something else within the system. In this case it would be useful to be able to replace the settings with snippets of Python code. And this is, effectively, what H...
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