Home Assistant integration not working anymore?

Smart Home & API Smart Home
1

I’ve gone through the threads here and at Home Assistant forums and cannot find a definitive answer. Rachio component installs fine in Home assistant and my zones are shown, but switches don’t activate the zones and watering status never gets updated. Some people are saying the component does not work anymore but others seem to have it working. Can anybody give me some advise?

2

Replying to myself here, in case it helps some other users. Turns out you need to setup your external web address and port number, after setting up port forwarding on your router. If not, Rachio cannot find your Home Assistant installation and use webhooks to update status, start zones, etc. So basically, to anybody using this component, you have to add

hass_url_override: "http://your.dns.address:XXXX"

to your config. XXXX is the outside port redirected to 8123 (it can also be 8123 - but not recommended). After that, Rachio component works like a charm.

1 Like
3

I’ve added external url:port to my configuration.yaml. While zone and connectivity status is now synchronized, standby switch status remains disconnected in my installation.

4

Confirmed, something is broken in the Standby section of the component. It doesn’t work.

If you still want to be able to turn standby mode on/off from Home Assistant, there’s an easy workaround. Create a Command-line switch and use Curl. It’s documented in Rachio’s API. Use this template (with your API token and Device ID):

switch:
  platform: command_line
  switches:
     Rachio_on_off:
       command_on: 'curl -X PUT -H "Content-Type: application/json" -H "Authorization: Bearer 8e600a4c-0027-4a9a-9bda-dc8d5c90350d" -d '{ "id" : "d3e99d27-25e4-47dd-b354-1db5a84c99d7" }' "https://api.rach.io/1/public/device/on"'
       command_off: 'curl -X PUT -H "Content-Type: application/json" -H "Authorization: Bearer 8e600a4c-0027-4a9a-9bda-dc8d5c90350d" -d '{ "id" : "d3e99d27-25e4-47dd-b354-1db5a84c99d7" }' "https://api.rach.io/1/public/device/off"'

Now the switch will turn standby mode on and off but it will not reflect on/off status when changed in the app or Rachio’s WebUI. I guess it can be done by polling that info every few seconds, but I don’t think it’s worth it, plus you might hit the API call limit.

5

Thanks, I’ll try this out.

6

I get port forwarding however where do you port forward to? Just confused. Is this home kit you are working with?

7

You forward an outside port to your lan’s 8123 port (Home Assistant). Say you choose to forward port 44444 to 8123, then you’ll have to add this to your Rachio’s configuration:

hass_url_override: "http://your.dns.address:44444"

with your dns address or your fixed IP address.

This is for the Home Assistant component. HomeKit works out of the box with Rachio. You can use both at the same time.

8

Thanks for your reply.
Was having same issue and dig some digging to come up with same diagnosis, now to try and expose only a tiny bit of HA externally.