Home Assistant is the largest Open Source home automation system in use today. They have recently released the latest development track called Hass.io; designed to make it easier to create automations in a simple and intuitive way, without needing to know Linux or Python and do a bunch of command line stuff to get them to work.
It would be nice if Rachio were to build a Hass.io add-on so we could set up automations or at the very least, put it all in one place. Here is a screen shot of a typical Hass.io interface:
It would be so nice to have a tab next to “Rooms” that said “Rachio” even if was only to frame the app,rach,io interface!
Rachio has lots of ways already to turn off the water if something happens (rains, flow meter sensors, etc), but what about ways to turn it on? How about when a motion sensor detects an intruder it turns on the sprinkler to chase them away. Intruders don’t like getting wet I hear. And how about that neighbor’s dog that keep doing his business on your lawn! The possibilities for automation are endless.
Love this idea, specifically those ideas for automation . Rachio does have an open API, so maybe one of our technically inclined power users could even start playing with this… Regardless, I will definitely log this for the team and explore their website!
looks like there is some interesting improvements in home-assistant. The default integration currently is still a little lack luster. I wrote a few scripts to handle triggering quick runs in the evening after hot days, but not really happy with the ui. I am using the copied code iframe in my configuration.yaml from the documentation. It launches the rachio.io page on its own dashboard. It is pretty responsive even thru a proxy:
I would love to be able to see the schedule, or next run time, but Rachio still refuses to allow access to that info in their API. As for last run time, it does sort of show up under the Summary attribute for each zone, and logbook and history will show you when zones and schedules turned on and off as well.
I imagine it is not a matter of refusing, but rather a business decision to allocate resources to develop that part into the API… There is probably a bit of a headache to apply it to the different types of applications (home-assistant, vs Alexa, vs Google home, etc) and spend the time to make sure it works? I would think the last runtime would not be that hard, but the calendar would probably be a bit of work:
It would be beyond most peoples ability, but I wonder if there is a way to at least pull the last runtime out of the home-assistant log?
Hmmm… you opened a can of worms with that question… I was thinking the last time a Zone was ran, but having the aggregate runtime on the last schedule runtime would be useful too?
I am only on my second week of Flex schedule, so I am still trying to figure out how things are going to run. It is summer where I am at, so I probably won’t have any real variation until the rainy season starts. That is when I will be most interested in when and how long the controller decides to run.
In the summer time I run a longer schedule in the morning, and then run a short schedule in the evening 3x a week. In the Winter I only run it in the morning, provided the rain sensor does not trigger. I haven’t figured out how to schedule that yet, but that would be interesting information to see on a dashboard? For now it looks like it is available in History and the Logbook. Which I guess is fine for now.
I have not dug too deep into the HA engine to see where this stuff is being stored, but I imagine it is in a SQLite instance? I do not know if I will go that deep just yet, as I plan to move in the next couple years, but I plan to utilize HA in my next house, so I might as well figure it out before the time comes?
. Rachio does have an open API, so maybe one of our technically inclined power users could even start playing with this… Regardless, I will definitely log this for the team and explore their website!
