freeathome

Free@Home component for Home Assistant

This is a component for Free @ Home from Busch-Jaeger. Lights, light groups, scenes, covers, binary sensors, climate devices and the sensors of the weather station wil show up in Home Assistant.

Installation

Manual

Place the files in the custom_components directory. This should be in the same directory as the configuration.yaml. Then you can do a restart of Home Assistant.

With Home Assistant version 0.88 the way sources should be placed in the custom_components directory has changed. This version won't work on earlier versions.

Free@home now appears as an integration in Home Assistant.

HACS

Install this component in HACS by adding it as a custom repository of the type integration.

Youtube

This is a German tutorial about using Home Assistant for integrating Free@Home and Apple Homekit/Siri. It shows how to install Home Assistant and this integration on a Raspberry Pi. https://youtu.be/9xfUhRiwK_s

Configuration

The sysap will be autodetected through zeroconf. Then you only have to fill in a username and password.

If the sysap is not autodetected, you can add the integegration. Then you have to add a host, username and password.

The configuration.yaml can still be used, then u have to add the following lines:

freeathome:
  host: <ip adress of the sysapserver> or SysAP.local  
  username: <Username in free@home>    
  password: <Password in free@home>    
  use_room_names: <This is optional, if True then combine the device names with the rooms. False by default>
  switch_as_x: <This is optional, if False then switching devices are exposed as lights. True by default>

`switch_as_x` feature

Recently a change has been made to the way switches are exposed in Home Assistant. Before they were all exposed as lights but now they are exposed as switches. This would be a breaking change for people who have automations that use the light.turn_on service, but it should be working the same as before if you are upgrading from an older version of this custom component. If you want to be sure, you can set the switch_as_x option to False in your configuration.yaml.

Any new installation of this custom component will have switch_as_x set to True by default. This means that all switches will be exposed as switches and you'll be able to use the HA switch_as_x feature. If you want to expose them as lights, you can set switch_as_x to False in your configuration.yaml.

Events

Actuators that are exposed in Home Assistant as binary sensors (typically wall switches) fire an event when pressed. The event type is freeathome_event and contains the following actuator's information:

Key	Type	Example
name	string	Actuator Hallway
serialnumber	string	ABB700CE9999
unique_id	string	ABB700CE9999/ch0000
state	bool	true for on / false for off
command	string	"pressed" is the only option at this moment

The event fires regardless of the state of the binary sensory in Home Assistant and Free@Home. Each time the wall switch is pressed, the event fires.

These events can be used in automations. For example to turn on a light every time the actuator's "on" button is pressed:

trigger:
  - platform: event
    event_type: freeathome_event
    event_data:
      unique_id: ABB700CE9999/ch0000
      command: pressed
      state: true
action:
  - service: light.turn_on
    target:
      entity_id:
      - light.nice_lamp

Debugging

If one of your devices does not work, feel free to open an issue. Please provide some debugging information about your setup. In order to add new devices, please also send a copy of your free@home device XML configuration as well as some status updates. See below how to obtain both.

1. Dumping free@home configuration

Go to Developer Tools -> Services
Enter Service: freeathome.dump
Leave Service data empty
Hit Call Service

Then look in your Home Assistant configuration folder for a file called freeathome_dump_<ip>.xml and attach it to an issue (e.g. by using https://paste.ubuntu.com/).

2. Monitoring free@home status updates

Go to Developer Tools -> Services
Enter Service: freeathome.monitor
Enter Service data: duration: 5
Hit Call Service

Now the system will record device updates for the next 5 seconds. Look in your Home Assistant configuration folder for a file called freeathome_monitor_<ip>.xml and attach it to your issue (e.g. by using https://paste.ubuntu.com/).

Credits

Many thanks to Tho85 for building future proof, function based components Thanks to Foti for testing the cover device! Thanks to Lasse Magnussen for the climate device! Thanks to Nadir for testing the weather station Thanks to jfindlay for making the the pure_pynacl library available: https://github.com/jfindlay/pure_pynacl Thanks to jeroen84 for the PyNaCl implementation

jheling / freeathome

readme