Home Assistant is an open source home automation tool, not a voice assistant. It's very good, I've been using it since early days. They also place a big emphasis on privacy and local control.
It's extremely good. I've been using it for a few years now in multiple locations and it's really incredibly powerful. Turn an old boiler into a smart furnace with a $5 MCU and a relay? Done. Full security system with email notifications containing snapshots from your webcam? Done. Turn old IR remote control into a full-house controller with a $1 IR receiver? Done. Man I love home-assistant.
Do you have any tutorials, docs, code or anywhere you can send me for helpful tips on doing this with an IR remote/receiver? I want to automate a garage door and a gate because I accidentally leave them open all the time and they aren’t easy to see from the house so it would be nice to have a notification or state manager on my phone.
I do something similar, I have an ESP8266 microcontroller hooked up to an IR sender/receiver that I can use to send and receive codes from Home Assistant to control some stuff. The module I use takes care of encoding and decoding the IR and simply dumps it to serial, which the micro reads and forwards to Home Assistant via MQTT (and vice versa). It's this one
but it's not hard to do it with a bare IR emitter and receiver. Unfortunately I haven't had have much time lately to document many of my projects for other people, but you can learn a lot from Youtube and Google these days.
Here's a blog post where the original LIRC component in Home Assistant was developed along with some info about how to use it [1]. In here an A/C unit, a TV, and a stereo are all controlled with one little IR LED.
With a little z-wave door sensor (just a magnetic reed switch), you could have Home Assistant run an automation that says "If gate is open at 9:30am, close it." so then you don't even have to log in to click it.
I use an ultrasonic sensor to detect when the door is open or closed. It's very reliable.
I even wired up Home Assistant to contact me (over sms by sending an email to my number@carrier) if the door has been open for >5 minutes, because I was precisely in your position of forgetting to close it.
> Full security system with email notifications containing snapshots from your webcam?
I've been wanting to add this to my setup. Do you have any more details on what you have done? My main hurdles would be choosing decent cameras that can be used by Home Assistant... Cameras that don't want to phone home all the damn time.
An initial setup (on an older version of HASS) is shown here [1]. That has the basics. I've had good luck with Amcrest cameras actually, which even have a component in HASS [2]. They never phone home (check default settings though, I think they want to at first) and I access the whole thing through a OpenWRT-hosted OpenVPN server hosted on my router(s). I also really want to make sure nothing phones home ever. You can set router-level firewall rules to block WAN access if need be.
Making one with a Pi Zero W + the camera is pretty straightforward. Most of the good network cameras with simple APIs (RTSP or MJPEG) are not so trustworthy on the security side.
There's an "official" raspberry pi camera module with mature libraries already written, and I believe it comes in both a regular IR and a No-IR version for night-ish vision.
There are also a ton of different 3D-printable mounts and jigs for them on sites like thingiverse and instructables.
My favorite[1] comes as a kit with the jig, 3 servo motors, and an add-on board for a raspi. Using this I have a live-feed camera that can rotate up to 180 degress on 3 axis that I can control from anywhere in the world using my phone as long as my internet connection is up at home. All hosted locally, even the live feed frontend. It's not hard to build or set up either, took me a lazy day and I'm far from a good coder.
(i'm past the time in which I can edit my original post)
I remembered incorrectly, that PiMoroni kit does not include the 3 servo motors, you need to buy those separately along with the RPi camera module. Luckily the servos required are super common little blue servos that are all over eBay and such for dirt cheap.
OpenVPN yes. I have my router hosting the openvpn, but I think you could do that on the RPi as well. I can't say for _sure_, as I haven't tried it personally, but I think there's more than enough juice on an RPi to host all of that, especially if it's only ever going to handle 1 or 2 simultaneous connections.
https://www.home-assistant.io/