Automating Home Assistant

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Once you add Automations to Home Assistant, they can be imported into your control system using and Input / Output Driver. You can then trigger these automations from you control system and also receive feedback if these automations have been triggered outside the control system.

Once your devices are set up, it’s time to put the cherry on the pie: automation. In this guide we’re going to create a simple automation rule to turn on the lights when the sun sets. Of course, this assumes that you have set up an integration that provides a light at this point.

In the user interface in the sidebar, click Settings > Automations & Scenes. You will now see the automation screen from which you can manage all the automations in Home Assistant.

Click the blue button at the bottom right to create a new automation. A dialog will appear. Choose Create new automation. You are presented with a blank automation screen.

The first thing we will do is set a name. Enter “Turn Lights On at Sunset”.

The second step is defining what should trigger
 our automation to run. In this case, we want to use the event of the sun setting to trigger our automation. However, if we would turn on the lights when the sun actually sets, it would be too late as it already gets quite dark while it’s setting. So we’re going to add an offset.

In the trigger section, click on the dropdown menu and change the trigger type to Sun. It allows us to choose sunrise or sunset, so go ahead and pick Sunset. As we discussed, we want our automation to be triggered a little before the sun actually sets, so let’s add -00:30 as the offset. This indicates that the automation will be triggered 30 minutes before the sun actually sets. Neat!

Once we have defined our trigger, scroll down to the action section. Make sure the action type is set to Call service and change the service to light.turn_on. For this automation we’re going to turn on all lights, so let’s change the service data to:

entity_id: all

YAMLCopy

Click the orange button to save the automation. Now wait till it’s 30 minutes until the sun sets and see your automation magic!

If after completing this getting started you are interested in reading more about automations, we recommend the following pages:

• Triggers
• Conditions
• Actions
• Presence Detection

Please note, these pages may require a bit more experience with Home Assistant than you probably have at this point of this tutorial.