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Getting your house to ask you for help: Using Email Notification in an 'Automation'

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 < Previous                                                                                            Home Test Your Notification The guys at Home Assistant got this . " Choose your service from the  Service  dropdown menu " And then I hit "Call Service".  (I have no doubt my wife wonders WTH I am doing sending her this email.  Better to keep her guessing) And holy cow!!!  It worked! Now I just need to try use this to tell us when batteries are getting low. Link the Battery Level to the email https://www.home-assistant.io/cookbook/notify_if_over_threshold/ So now I need to add an 'automation'.  I went to Configuration > Automations Selected "Add Automation". I skipped the page that tries to parse the automation, becaus...
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Getting your house to ask you for help: Setting up Email Notification using GMail

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 < Previous                                                                                            Next > We left off with my wife saying,  " I hope I remember to check (batteries) often enough " Well, what if the lock just told us when it needed new batteries? "Hey Mike and his awesome wife, this is the house - the batteries in the Scottish Room are getting low, they need to get changed soon." WARNING! Incoming System Design thoughts!  Skip this if only interested in the tech details! " I hope I remember to check often enough " - this is the human equivalent of something called 'polling'.  Basically it is similar to a child in the back seat: child: "Are we there yet?" driver: "No" child: "Are we there yet?" driver: "No!" child: "A...
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Adding Battery Gauges to my Dashboard

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 < Previous                                                                                             Next >   A change to the Dashboard So there are battery sensors in these door locks I have.  So I added them to my simple dashboard using a 'Grid' Card. I put the "Lock" entities in there too, because I liked the layout better.  Here, I added the locks as the first three items in the grid... and the battery sensors as the next three.  I chose to use a 'Gauge' because I liked the way it looked, and it was pretty "right" for a battery (IMHO). So now in my Dashboard on my phone, I have this: I like it! Much more importantly, so does my wife, who will be using this.  She looked at it and was happy that she would be able to look...
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Remote Access

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< Previous                                                                                              Next >  I decided to go ahead and configure the 'Cloud' so I could access my Home Assistant from anywhere.  It seems like an interesting way to control things, and as I mentioned...I am a techy guy. Getting the cloud set up was very easy.  I just followed this -  https://www.home-assistant.io/cloud/ It took less than 5 minutes.  Basically, I just set up an account from the Home Assistant Configuration > Home Assistant Cloud page.  I signed up for the free trial with full knowledge that I will have to pay $5 a month to use the service after the trial ends. Now I had to wait for the "Remote Control" to be ready... Wh...
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