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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, because what I am doing is too complicated for it to figure out. Then I filled out the automation. I gave it a name: Scottish Room Battery Change A description: Scottish Room Batteries need to be Changed Set the trigger type to &quo
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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: "Are we there yet?" driver: "NO!!" child: "Are we there yet?" driver: <drives into a tree> It is a lot more efficient to just wait until
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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 and see if the batteries needed changing, then said: " I hope I remember to check often enough ". Wait a minute...what if...? <insert cliffhanger here>  < Previous                                        
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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... While I waited, I got the Amazon Alexa thing set up.  I just followed the link on the Home Assistant page under "Alexa" for "Enable the Home Assistant skill for Alexa".   We have an Alexa "Dot", so setting this up was
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