Tag Archives: automation

Automation, Hardware

Report proper RATGDO door state in home assistant

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I have an old dry contact garage door opener. I’ve wired it to a nifty ratgdo device to control it with Home Assistant. I ran into an issue with wiring reed switches to report the garage door state (open / closed.) The wires carrying the data would pick up RFI that made my remotes stop working. I never did find a way around this wired issue, so I went wireless and installed a Zigbee door sensor.

I struggled to get Home Assistant to report the state of the door as reported by the sensor. After much reading of documentation I finally got it working! Here is my configuration.yml:

cover:

  – platform: template

    covers:

      east_garage_door:

        device_class: garage

        friendly_name: “East Garage Door”

        unique_id: “east_garage_door”

        value_template: “{{ is_state(‘binary_sensor.east_garage_door_opening’, ‘on’) }}”

        open_cover:

          – action: button.press

            target:

              entity_id: button.east_garage_door_toggle_door

        close_cover:

          – action: button.press

            target:

              entity_id: button.east_garage_door_toggle_door

        stop_cover:

          action: button.press

          target:

            entity_id: button.east_garage_door_toggle_door

CLI, Hardware

Trigger button to run a script in Home Assistant

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I configured a button (Runlesswire Click) to log diaper changes for my new baby. The diaper changes are logged in a Google Docs spreadsheet. I set up a simple public facing Google Form that I could run unauthenticated curl requests against. I then configured Home Assistant to run that curl command when the button is pressed. Instant diaper logging by the press of a button.

Lessons learned:

  • Zigbee Home Assistant (ZHA) does not yet support the Zigbee Green protocol, which the RunlessWire Click uses. I had to pair the switches to my Hue hub instead.
    * It looks like they’re getting close to supporting it, though: https://github.com/zigpy/zigpy/pull/1282

Here was my process:

  • Create Google Form
  • Obtain form ID from URL bar
  • Get pre-filled link to get names of fields by clicking the three dots on top right and clicking “Get pre-filled link”. Make note of the names for each entry e.g. entry.1363419348
    Thanks to help from: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65142364/i-cant-find-name-attribute-while-inspecting-input-elements-of-google-form-ho
  • Curl command is: 
    curl https://docs.google.com/forms/<FORM_URL>/formResponse -d ifq -d <ENTRY_NAME>=<ENTITY_VALUE> -d <ADDITIONAL_ENTRY_NAME>=<ADDITIONAL_ENTRY_VALUE> -d submit=Submit
    Thanks to help from: https://eureka.ykyuen.info/2014/07/30/submit-google-forms-by-curl-command/
  • Shell commands go into configuration.yaml
    shell_command:
      log_pee: <CURL_COMMAND>
      log_poo: <CURL_COMMAND>
    Thanks to help from: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/dont-understand-how-to-use-shell-commands/576580/9
  • Restart Home Assistant to pick up your configuration changes.
  • Configure the automation to call Service: shell_command

Success!