Home Assistant TV Dashboard | Android Alliance

The Problem

Many of us have a video doorbell that will notify us of movement or when someone presses the button, this notification will be on your mobile device or a Nest Smart Display or Alexa Show, but how many times have you been caught out with your mobile device being out of reach or not being able to see your smart display, wouldn’t it be easier if the notification appeared on the largest screen in your home?

A Solution

Enter HA TV Dashboard, a TV companion app for Home Assistant which app allows you to access your Home Assistant instance, camera feeds and notifications all on the largest screen in your home.

Features

Stream multiple live camera feeds.
Display video live feed event notifications as they happen without interrupting the content you are viewing.
View previous camera events.
Show and interact with a Home Assistant dashboard.
Display additional miscellaneous notifications like:
- - London Tube Status
  - Current Weather
  - Calendar Events
  - Show current time

Challenge

How do you get a video doorbell event to appear on your TV? The theory is simple:

Observe the event from the video doorbell
Notify a bespoke application on your Android TV and provide image and stream video links.

How do you implement this? The solution I chose involves using Home Assistant and writing bespoke Android TV app.

Developing

Anyone who knows me will know that I have a passion for smart home tech and the Home Assistant project.
So I set about developing a solution to the the video doorbell to TV problem. The solutions I put in place are:

Home Assistant listens for events from the video doorbell, but the trigger does not need to be from the doorbell.
Home Assistant then notifies the Android TV app via the Mobile integration.
The HA TV Dashboard app establishes and maintains a websocket connection to the the Home Assistant server and observes the notify channel.
When a notification is received the HA Tv Dash app queries the HA server for the feed camera feed.
- The feed can be from any of the cameras integrated with HA.
The HA TV Dashboard app establishes and maintains a MQTT connection for miscellaneous notifications like Transit, Weather or Calendar.

Download Home Assistant and install the app on your Android TV, you’ll wonder how you managed with out it!

HA TV Dashboard: