I have been playing with Home Assistent. Yes, our home should be smart too :-). But I am not giving up my privacy, so only a local solution was considered! Here are a few pitfalls that I experienced when configuring Home Assistant, I hope they are useful to you too.

FritzBox device tracker:

I have a FritzBox from AVM, so I installed the “platform: fritz” module to track devices in our WLAN. However, that led to mysterious “Failed to establish connection to FRITZ!Box with IP: 169.254.1.1” errors. Debugging the underlying package “fritzconnection”, it turns out that you need to turn on “Zugriff für Anwendungen zulassen” AND “Statusinformationen über UPnP übertragen” in your Homenetwork->Network Settings, to make it work. This will turn on TR-64 and the transmission of the necessary status information. Error handling of this package could be a tad better….

FritzBox DECT switch (Fritz DECT 210):

the “platform: fritzdect” module is supposed to handle The Fritz DECT 210 remote switch. However, I still haven’t gotten it to work. I receive error messages in the form:

 File "/usr/local/lib/python3.6/dist-packages/homeassistant/components/switch/f
ritzdect.py", line 157, in update
 self.state = actor.get_state()
 File "/home/hassio/.homeassistant/deps/lib/python3.6/site-packages/fritzhome/a
ctor.py", line 56, in get_state
 int(self.box.homeautoswitch("getswitchstate", self.actor_id))
ValueError: invalid literal for int() with base 10: 'inval'

Notifications via XMPP/Jabber:

I have managed to receive notification messages via XMPP when certain things happen. Now I need to come up with smart rules, to make things smart….

ARTICLE WILL BE UPDATED AS I PLAY MORE WITH HOME ASSISTANT.