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this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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homeassistant
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Home Assistant is open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server. Available for free at home-assistant.io
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Imagine you have a household with 2 adults and 2 kids, and you've setup some level of presence tracking. You want to use automations to turn off everything if nobody is home, turn on some things if only kids are home, turn on other things if only adults are home, and turn on everything if kids and adults are home. You could build this logic into every automation you have, but it's a lot of repeated logic to put in every time you wanna add something cool.
Blueprints mean you don't have to write it out in every automation. But I've never found them to be especially convenient for updating. And they still have the automation doing all of the heavy lifting.
You could have a home State sensor that you depend on automations to manually update. But this is only as up to date as you make it, either running every so often (stale data) or using automations based on a change in presence tracking to update a sensor (buggy maybe? have not tried it but sounds prone to race conditions and misfires to me). Closer, but unideal IMO.
Or you could pull this logic into a service that returns 1 of 4 possible states - full, empty, kids, adults. Your automation no longer has any logic to figure out what the state is or who's home, it just asks what set of rules are in effect and can apply them. This lets the automation focus on a smaller area, which means less shit that needs updating if you change something, less chance for bugs.
There's not a ton new you can do now that you couldn't accomplish before, but you can do it in smarter, more maintainable ways.
Users don’t create their own services, services are how you initiate actions with integrated devices and entities.
You’d still need to create automations based on the first method you described, and it’s already extremely simple using an entity group.
Thanks for the detailed response!
Ok, so I’m thinking script responses would be useful for a sections of logic, that have one (or more) of the following characteristics:
I think I’m wrapping my head around scripts responses. Still need to imagine how it will work for other services.