Controlling a Smart Plug from a Pi

Adrian

I can turn my switch on and off either using Home Assistant or directly from my browser. What I want to do is to be able to have a Pi turn it on and off from a script, and poll it for its status (minimum On/Off, and ideally power consumption).

Digging around on online implies that I should be able to do the switching using Python talking to Home Assistant, but I’ve yet to get that to work. I appear to be able to connect to the broker (on Home Assistant), but that seems to be it .

Logging suggests that it gets the message, but the switch doesn’t operate.

Where to look next ?

Thanks in advance.

Adrian

RebeccaH

Hi @Adrian

That’s a good question!

So, there are a couple of ways you could do that. The easiest is probably to create an automation in HA that is triggered by a web hook. Please see documentation below:

https://www.home-assistant.io/docs/automation/trigger/#webhook-trigger

That automation would then be responsible for toggling the switch. You would trigger it by making a web request from your PI. This could be in Python using something like the requests library or a simple script using Curl or WGet.

Hope this helps!

RebeccaH

I’ve created a really basic automation that will toggle a switch when it receives the webhook request:

description: ""
mode: single
triggers:
  - trigger: webhook
    allowed_methods:
      - POST
      - PUT
    local_only: true
    webhook_id: "--IhK573BsB54oLVywf1V_XBn"
conditions: []
actions:
  - action: switch.toggle
    metadata: {}
    data: {}
    target:
      entity_id: switch.bedroom_lamp_relay

You could trigger this with

curl -X POST https://your-home-assistant:8123/api/webhook/--IhK573BsB54oLVywf1V_XBn

You’ll need to change the URL and the entity id.I’d also recommend changing the webhook ID

Adrian

RebeccaH

Thanks Rebecca, I’ll have a look at that when I’ve got half an hour spare.

Adrian

RebeccaH
Thanks very much. I’ve had a play with that, and, using the wizard type thing on Home Assistant (which auto generates the webhook ID), I’ve created actions to toggle, turn on and turn off the switch, and using curl, I can get that to work from a Pi.

Now to investigate getting the status info.

Adrian

OwlPaste

Not sure if this is what you wanted, but I went for a script that turns off a smart plug if it detects the same plug using a specific amount of power. Use case here, is I got a TV which consumed obscene amount of power on deep standby no matter what settings I tweak, so this script detects when the TV is in that state and turns the plug off.

You can use this with the GUI wizard. You might want to increase the timeout, as I have seen sometimes this fail and turn off the TV when its in use. So maybe 20min is better.

Example

RebeccaH

Fab thanks!