Yes, it is possible and you don’t need to build anything from sources. Sending SMS from your home could be useful, for example, to send emergency alerts. But what about receiving and parsing SMS messages? Well, I used it to integrate my car security system with my Home Assistant. Now my Home Assistant could start the engine of my car automatically to warm it up before driving to work.
Bed presence detection could be very useful in home automation to control the lights and appliances you don’t need at night, but want to be ready in the morning. And today we will build a bed presence sensor out of a very universal device for DIY IoT. It is an Aqara ZigBee window and door sensor. Why it is so universal? Let’s take a closer look at its internals.
Home Assistant 0.115 got the ability to use variables in automation and scripts. You can declare variables even using templates and use them across the script or automation. Here is an example from the release notes:
automation:
trigger:
platform: sun
event: sunset
offset: -00:30
variables:
notification_service: notify.paulus_iphone
action:
- service: "{{ notification_service }}"
data:
message: Beautiful sunset!
Previously my presence detection in Home Assistant works through Asus router and asuswrt component. And it was bad. Very bad. Recently I switched to Google WiFi and realized that the only way to implement presence detection with this router is IFTTT (Update: No). I thought it would be the slowest presence detection in the world but I was wrong.