Hi,
I’d like to use Equiwatt with my Home Assistant setup. Do you have any plans for releasing a HA integration?
Ideally, I’m expecting a simple Off-On switch command during an equivent (normal/manual event). I can then relay this command to other integrations within Home Assistant.
Welcome to the community @The_G! This is such a timely topic, as we just started working on an open API last week! I am very close to posting about it here to get feedback from everyone.
Our plan for the initial version of this is to allow you to obtain a non-expiring token from the app. With this token, you’ll be able to call an endpoint which will tell you if an equivent is currently live or not.
Would this work for your use case? We definitely want to build more support & features for the Home Assistant community, so would love to hear any specific requirements you may have.
That sounds like a good approach that would be easy to integrate.
I would guess currently you can see that a kasa socket has been switched from outside your control especially on something like a freezer that presumably only equiwatt ever turn off to get the same signal but the API would be much neater and be independent of kasa.
HA integration would be awesome, or even just IFTTT integration, then we can use that with HA to turn devices off in equivents
@Derek_ladkin That’s a cool idea too! I guess the advantage with that approach would be that you wouldn’t have to poll the equivent URL all the time to see if an event is live.
@Ganey IFTTT is also in the works! And in terms of a proper HA integration, where can we start?
If we want to create a push system with Home Assistant to alert you of equivents, would getting the user to enter their external HA URL along with a “Long-Lived Access Token” as shown here HA REST API
And then sending events such as “equivent_started” & “equivent_ended” to api/events/<event_type> work?
It’s a while since i used the HA api, but that sounds about right?
An alternative approach for HA would be to let customers provide a webhook URL in their profile for started/ended, then they can use webhook triggers as documented here: Automation Trigger - Home Assistant
From a developers point of view though, it might be possible for you to only need to send the start/stop events to an Equiwatt IFTTT service once (instead of once per user account)
Then it’s up to each HA user to wire up the IFTTT to either use HA, or even configure IFTTT to do something like IF equiwatt.started THEN hive.some_plug = off
I’m not super keen on IFTTT, but it is quite simple to use, and possibly requires significantly less work from your side to get set up?
Kasa plugs can be added to Smartthings and i currently have a rule to turn off some Tapo plugs and other devices that Smartthings works with when a Kasa plug linked to Equiwatt goes off.
This sounds like the best way forward for the HA integration! As having the user’s token like I described gives us quite a lot of access to their home.
Re: IFTTT, it definitely is quite simple from an user perspective. But it requires a sort of shim API that we need to write just for it. We also need to expose an OAuth2 auth mechanism which we’re working on.
Thanks everyone for the feedback! I will soon create a new topic with a more finalized solution for more feedback.
Another vote for a HA integration
Ah, that answers my question.
I think I have an automation to build… 