Home Assistant

Home Assistant is our self-hosted smart home platform. It controls lights, switches, sensors, and automations across the house, running locally with no cloud dependency.

Overview

Home Assistant¹ is an open-source home automation platform. In our setup it runs as a dedicated instance on the local network, managing everything from IKEA lighting to presence detection. The agent interacts with it via the REST API through the homeassistant skill.

Key Concepts

Entities

Everything in Home Assistant is an entity — a light, a sensor, a switch, a person. Each has a unique ID like light.bedroom or binary_sensor.bathroom_door and exposes state plus attributes.

Integrations

Integrations connect HA to devices and services. Our setup uses:

Matter — for IKEA smart home devices (lights, plugs)
Zigbee (via ZHA or Zigbee2MQTT) — for remotes and some sensors
Mobile App — Companion App on Pixel 8 Pro for presence and sensor data
CalDAV — planned integration with Baïkal for calendar-aware automations

Automations & Scripts

Automations fire on triggers (sensor changes, time, events) and run actions
Scripts are reusable sequences of actions, callable from automations or the API

Our Setup

Lighting

The upstairs lighting group (light.upstairs_2) includes:

Entity	Name	Color Modes
`light.bedroom`	Bed Lamp	color_temp, xy
`light.upstairs_floor_lamp`	Upstairs Floor Lamp	color_temp, xy
`light.upstairs`	Upstairs Den Lamp	color_temp, xy
`light.red_lamp`	Red Lamp	color_temp, hs, xy
`light.upstairs_lamp`	Upstairs Lamp	color_temp, xy
`light.stairwell`	Stairwell	on/off

All upstairs lights are IKEA devices connected via Matter, supporting color temperature control (warm white to cool white) and XY color on most fixtures.

Remotes & Controls

A Zigbee remote in the bedroom controls the upstairs lights with on/off, dim up/down, and an “everything off” function. It runs on battery (typically 100%) and communicates directly with HA — no cloud round-trip.

Sensors

Sensor	Type	Status
`binary_sensor.bathroom_door`	Contact	✅ Working
`binary_sensor.upstairs_motion`	Motion	✅ Working
`binary_sensor.downstairs_motion`	Motion	✅ Working
`binary_sensor.kitchen_motion`	Motion	✅ Working
`binary_sensor.bathroom_motion`	Motion	❌ Dead battery

Presence

person.brad_wenner — tracks home/away via Companion App
input_boolean.floor_occupancy — tracks upstairs vs. downstairs

Morning Routine

The morning routine is designed as a multi-stage wake-up system that adapts to the type of day (workday, weekday, weekend).

Architecture

graph TD
    A["🔔 Alarm Sensor / Next Alarm"] -->|10 min before alarm| B["Morning Routine Start"]
    B -->|"Check: person home?"| C{"Home?"}
    C -->|No| Z["Skip"]
    C -->|Yes| D["Determine day type<br/>(work cal + day of week)"]
    D --> E["morning_routine_active = ON"]
    E --> F["Light Ramp Script<br/>10-min gradual brightness<br/>2200K → 3500K"]
    
    F --> G{"Remote OFF / Snooze?"}
    G -->|"Yes + NOT workday"| H["Snooze: lights off → 5 min wait<br/>→ accelerated 5-min ramp"]
    G -->|"Yes + workday"| I["Ignore<br/>(no snooze on work days)"]
    G -->|No interruption| J{"Awake trigger?<br/>bathroom door / stairs / downstairs"}
    H --> J
    
    J --> K["morning_routine_active = OFF"]
    K --> L{"Day type?"}
    L -->|Workday| M["🏢 Workday actions"]
    L -->|Weekday| N["📋 Weekday actions"]
    L -->|Weekend| O["☕ Weekend actions"]

Day Type Logic

The system checks the Work calendar (via CalDAV) for CONFIRMED events. Only confirmed shoots trigger the workday path — HOLD events are treated as unconfirmed.

IF calendar.work has CONFIRMED event today → "workday"
ELSE IF Monday–Friday → "weekday"
ELSE → "weekend"

Prerequisites

The full routine requires:

CalDAV integration added to HA (Baïkal server)
Next Alarm sensor enabled in Companion App
Sleep as Android HACS integration reconnected (for alarm events)

Helpers

input_boolean.morning_routine_active — is the routine running?
input_boolean.morning_routine_snoozed — snooze state
input_select.morning_day_type — weekday / workday / weekend
input_datetime.morning_alarm_time — alarm time storage
timer.morning_snooze — snooze countdown

Agent Integration

The agent controls Home Assistant via the homeassistant skill, which wraps the HA REST API. Common operations:

Toggle lights and switches
Query entity states and attributes
Fire scripts and automations
Create/update helper entities

Credentials are stored in Vaultwarden under the “Home Assistant” item.

Footnotes

Home Assistant official documentation: https://www.home-assistant.io/ (verified accessible 2026-02-26) ↩

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