Homeassistant

I’ve been struggling with Home Assistant notifications. From some searching, it seems other people are also struggling. A lot of videos online cover basic “How to send a notification to your phone”, but I wanted a whole lot more life-cycle than that. I want to clear them. And I don’t want to have to write a thousand action conditions, either. I sat down and spent far more time than I’d like to admit to tackling the problem. This might not fit every use-case for every person, but this was exactly the functionality I needed. ...

A better, more complete (with dashboard + mobile automation sync) is available in a new article: Home Assistant Notifications (with Sync in Dashboard and Mobile) The original article is preserved below. I encourage you to use the new one, though. ...

I’ve recently been porting things from Samsung Smartthings to Home Assistant. Smartthings has a significantly lower learning curve, but suffered from a reliance on the cloud. While you have a local hub, any “custom” device handlers actually ran on the cloud on Samsung servers somewhere. Which means advanced functionality was often very, very slow. ...