A few months ago, Emilio Cano, Emilcar, he asked us a question about how to receive notifications if you left a window or door open long, I left the links to episode 44 and to episode 45 podcast.
The solution he gave at the time to Emilcar was to use Driver for Homekit in its payment version, which includes the functionality of Advanced Notifications. This functionality consists of a server that returns a URL to you to call it from shortcuts, so you can tell it ‘When this bulb is turned on, call this URL’ and the Controller server sends you a Push notification to your device with the text you set up.
The truth is, The functionality is very interesting because, since Apple’s Native House application, you can’t have a notification sent when a bulb is turned on, for example, or when the temperature is down to 19 degrees. You can receive notifications when you open a door, for example, but there are other interesting alerts that you can’t easily set up. The example of Emilcar is very simple, I just wanted to receive a notification if a window had been open for a long time… for nothing, can be done without spells or third party apps, not even with a shortcut like this without more.
It is clear that with Controller For HomeKit it can be solved, but There are two things that don’t bother much… the first is the price, since the Controller people have been increasing the application as it was gaining functionalities. I remember I bought it a few years ago with the payment for life and cost me 39 €, but now the one-time payment is going to 100 €! And if you pay it monthly or annually you don’t get much cheaper… when it’s not supposed to be an app you have to open every day; once you’ve done your automations, notifications and configurations you don’t have to open it anymore and you can manage all your devices from
the Home app in a much simpler and more visual way. And the second is that you’re depending on a ‘third party’ server. That notification comes out of your local network to get to your device. If the Controller people’s server stops working, you’re out of notification.
Pushover
So Today I bring you an alternative for notifications, a service called Pushover. In addition, Pushover is a more multi-purpose alternative than Control For HomeKit for notifications, as it allows you to set up Push notifications for almost anything, not just for Home devices… imagine for example that you have an IFTTT automation, as you can get a push notification to your mobile, or when someone makes a GitHub commitment to a project you follow, or when one of the series we follow publishes a new episode… and of course he could.
let us integrate with our devices in the same way as we do with Controller for Homekit, that is, Pushover will provide us with a user token, we will record our device and an application, which will generate us a URL. Then we would have to create the shortcut from our device so that, for example, when a bulb is turned on, it makes a Get URL, and in that URL we put the data that the people of Pushover have provided us.
Although It’s a cheaper solution than Controller for Homekit, not free. Pushover costs 5 €per account And if you want to send a warning to another person’s device, you should have your own account and pay another 5 bucks, which is not cool. Then you can create distribution groups, but everyone has to have their account. That’s right. the 5 euro plan allows you to send 10,000 messages per month, about 330 messages a day… should be enough to find out if you’ve left the window open! In addition, notifications are simple notifications, you cannot set up actions to be shown by clicking on the notification. Of nue
vo Controller for HomeKit continues to win… but Remember that Controller is not only paid for notifications, we also have the whole Maintenance part of your network that I have already told you many times and that it allows you things as interesting as creating a backup of your automations, storing the QR code of device matching in case you lose your sticker or indicating which of your automations has been out of work and why.
What if we use Home Assistant as a notification server?
Those who have Home Assistant as bridge but use the Home app because you have many HomeKit-compatible devices, you will surely be creating the automations and launching the notifications from Home Assistant because it is much easier and you have no limitation at all. From Home Assistant you can make ‘clickable’ notifications like those of Controller for HomeKit without having to pay for the app, and without having to pay for the Pushover service. In addition, the more I know the Controller’s notification server and Pushover’s functionalities, I think what they have behind them is a tuned Home Assistant and they charge us for utili
Zarlo. Home Assistant can be integrated even with Telegram so you already get the push-format notifications from the Telegram application and you can respond to the bot with the action to be done associated with the notification! Crazy. But that is, you lose one of the thanks of Home Assistant to have it all in local, as if your Internet connection fails or Telegram falls through a block like the one that has been set up these days in Spain, then you run out of notifications.
The thing is, I’ve been investigating if I can use Home Assistant as an internal notification server, that is, do with my Home Assistant local the same thing that these applications do, that I get a URL to call from a shortcut… and can be done using the Home Assistant API, but I still haven’t got it to work. Let’s see, it’s just a concept as I could directly generate that notification from Home Assistant without any complication because I have the devices on both platforms, but you know what I like to entangle. If someone has done this stupid thing that doesn’t really make much sense, tell me, and so I see where I’m failing.
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In short, If what we’re looking for is to have those notifications that we can’t create directly from the House app, it’s clear that Pushover is much cheaper… but if we want an app to help us create automations, advanced notifications that are also clickable and we can put in several ways or manage our House devices, then you better start saving and pass through the Controller box. wp: block {«ref»: 1612} /