10 Best and Most Popular Home Assistant Blueprints

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The 10 Best and Most Popular Home Assistant Blueprints

In this post we will take a look at the 10 most popular Home Assistant blueprints as chosen by the Home Assistant community!

Blueprints were introduced to Home Assistant at the dawn of 2021 in order to make things easierโ€ฆ Awesome!

In essence, blueprints are templates for automation. It is possible for individuals to develop intricate automations that they have tested and used individually before sharing them with the community.

Here are the 10 best and most popular blueprints from the community! If you are new to blueprints, have a quick read here.

  1. Low Battery Level Detection & Notification for All Battery Sensors
  2. Wake Up Light Alarm With Sunrise Effect
  3. Send Camera Snapshot Notification on Motion
  4. Turn on Light, Switch, Scene, Script or Group Based on Motion and Illuminance
  5. Notify or Do Something When an Appliance Finishes
  6. Ikea Five Button Remote for Lights
  7. Cast and Re-Cast a Lovelace View to a Google Hub
  8. Frigate Mobile App Notifications
  9. Create Automated Backups Every Day
  10. Vacation Lighting โ€“ Replay Historical Lighting

How Do I Use Home Assistant Blueprints?

In order to use a blueprint you first need to import it into Home Assistant. Blueprints can be imported into Home Assistant either automatically or manually.

Automatically Add a Blueprint to Home Assistant

You can add blueprints automatically by clicking the following button:

Manually Add a Blueprint to Home Assistant

You can also manually import a Blueprint to Home Assistant by completing the following steps:

  1. Go to the blueprint topic that you want to import.
  2. From the browserโ€™s address bar, copy the URL.
  3. Click the โ€œImport Blueprintโ€ button in the bottom right corner of the screen after going to Home Assistant Configuration Automations & Scenes Blueprints.
  4. Click โ€œPreview Blueprintโ€ after pasting the blueprint topic URL.
  5. Press the โ€œImport Blueprintโ€ button.

1. Low Battery Level Detection & Notification for All Battery Sensors

This is an alternative version of the use case for low battery level detection. This blueprint regularly tests all battery sensors and executes a certain action if the threshold is crossed.

This blueprint analyzes all sensors with the attribute device class set to โ€œbatteryโ€ for either reaching a threshold or being โ€œonโ€ (low-battery binary sensors with class โ€œbatteryโ€) rather than manually listing one or more sensors.

This implies that anytime a sensor entity with device class battery is added to Home Assistant, the sensor entity is immediately taken into account in the subsequent check.

Github Gist: https://gist.github.com/sbyx/1f6f434f0903b872b84c4302637d0890

Guide / Community Discussion: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/low-battery-level-detection-notification-for-all-battery-sensors/258664/8

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2. Wake Up Light Alarm With Sunrise Effect

This is a design for an alarm clock that doubles as a wake-up light, which can be dimmed and its color temperature adjusted.

It either uses an existing timestamp source (such the _next alarm sensor from the Android companion app) or a manual input to determine the alarm time.

A configurable number of minutes before to the alarm time, a dim, warm-colored light will gradually change to the fullest brightness and coldest light temperature supported by the lamp at the alarm time, creating the appearance of the sunrise.

Simply shutting off the light during the automation run will stop the morning effect. At the beginning of sunrise, user-defined operations can be carried out.

Github Gist: https://gist.github.com/sbyx/96c43b13b90ae1c35b872313ba1d2d2d

Guide / Community Discussion: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/wake-up-light-alarm-with-sunrise-effect/255193/5

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3. Send Camera Snapshot Notification on Motion

When motion is detected, this blueprint will send a photo taken by a camera to your phone.

Note that this requires the official Home Assistant app and Home Assistant Core 2021.3.

Guide / Community Discussion: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/send-camera-snapshot-notification-on-motion/254565/9

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4. Turn on Light, Switch, Scene, Script or Group Based on Motion and Illuminance

On the basis of motion detection and (optionally) low illumination level, turn on a light, switch, scene, or script.

Additionally, you can specify a blocker entity and time constraints for the automation. You can choose to have the entity turn off if no motion is detected for a predetermined period of time.

In order to dynamically adjust limits for some of the (optional) input values in this design, you will need to develop your own helper entities. Hardcoded limits cannot be established for these inputs.

Another option is to define a blocking entity, which prevents automation from occurring when its state is enabled. For instance, this can mean that sleep mode is enabled.

To restrict the amount of time before and after the automation should trigger, time limitations can also be provided.
The automation should not activate outside of these bounds.

The automation will skip these criteria if the optional entities are not configured.

Optional entities:

  • Illuminance sensor (sensor)
  • Illuminance cutoff value (input_number)
  • Blocking entity (any entity with state on/off)
  • Time limit before (input_datetime)
  • Time limit after (input_datetime)
  • Wait time (input_number) [IN MINUTES!]

YAML definition of optional entities:

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Github Gist: https://gist.github.com/freakshock88/2311759ba64f929f6affad4c0a67110b

Guide / Community Discussion: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/turn-on-light-switch-scene-script-or-group-based-on-motion-and-illuminance-more-conditions/257085

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5. Notify or Do Something When an Appliance Finishes

When an appliance, like a dishwasher or washing machine, has finished operating, this blueprint will start a series of user-defined actions.

For completing detection, a power sensor is employed. First a check happens to make sure that the device has been initiated by crossing a specific power threshold for a predetermined period of time.

In order to prevent the action from being triggered at startup or after reloading automations, this is necessary. The appliance is then determined to be finished by patiently waiting until it drops below a specific power level.

You can freely select which actions, such as push notifications or TTS announcements, Google Home will be carried out.

Github Gist: https://gist.github.com/sbyx/6d8344d3575c9865657ac51915684696

Guide / Community Discussion: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/notify-or-do-something-when-an-appliance-like-a-dishwasher-or-washing-machine-finishes/254841/2

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6. Ikea Five Button Remote for Lights

This is a blueprint for the round, five-button IKEA remotes, specifically the ZHA.

It was made specifically to be used with any lights, because the template for the fundamental light controls has already been mapped.

The central โ€œonโ€ button turns on/off the lights at the previously selected brightness (unless the force brightness is toggled on in the blueprint).

The brightness may be adjusted smoothly using the dim up/down buttons, which can be pressed and held until the desired brightness is achieved.

Both short and long button presses can be assigned to the โ€œleftโ€ and โ€œrightโ€ buttons. This enables you to assign anything, such as a scene.

Guide / Community Discussion: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/zha-ikea-five-button-remote-for-lights/253804/6

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7. Cast and Re-Cast a Lovelace View to a Google Hub

When the Google Hub is not playing anything, this blueprint casts a lovelace view to it (or any Chromecast device, for that matter).

To make up for the fact that the hub automatically switches to picture frame mode after 10 minutes, it recasts the same view every nine minutes.

You must have the Lovelace Cast setup for this to work:

  • Setup HTTPS on your Home Assistant installation.
  • Ensure that your Home Assistant is reachable through HTTPS on the internet and that Configuration -> General is operational (the external URL)
  • Authenticate on https://cast.home-assistant.io/3.5k to set up the lovelace casting.

Guide / Community Discussion: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/cast-and-re-cast-a-lovelace-view-to-a-google-hub/259631/3

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8. Frigate Mobile App Notifications

Frigate is a comprehensive local Network Video Recorder (NVR) with AI object detection created for Home Assistant. carries out real-time object detection locally for IP cameras using OpenCV and Tensorflow.

When a Frigate event for the chosen camera fires, this blueprint will notify your device.

The notification will initially only provide a thumbnail of the detection; however, it will thereafter contain clickable alerts that let you see the saved clip or picture when it becomes available or silence the notification for a certain period of time.

Github Gist: https://gist.github.com/hunterjm/8ff0005104dce3f28923294f49a443b1

Guide / Community Discussion: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/frigate-mobile-app-notifications/311091/13

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9. Create Automated Backups Every Day

This is another simple yet very useful blueprint. It is never a bad idea to create backups!

A daily automated backup will be created using this automation blueprint, and it also has the ability to notify the official Home Assistant mobile app.

Guide / Community Discussion: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/create-automated-backups-every-day/254039

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10. Vacation Lighting โ€“ Replay Historical Lighting

This is a very interesting blueprint for repeating the lighting actions from the previous week. The idea being that it can create the illusion that you are still home whilst on vacation.

A โ€œhistory statsโ€ sensor should be created for each light that will be regulated as part of your vacation/away lighting in order to monitor historical behavior.

The blueprint associates each โ€œhistory statsโ€ sensor with a respective light entity before replaying the on/off action in response to changes in the sensorโ€™s state.

If enabled for more than one week, the same behavior is replayed.

  • Vacation mode input_boolean
    An input boolean is used as the on/off condition of the blueprint
  • Controls up to 10 Lights
    This blueprint controls up to (10) lights. Home assistant doesnโ€™t like blank !input variables, so for fewer than (10) lights, a dummy sensor can be used as placeholders for those entities
  • Controls light or switch entities
    • Default Brightness
      A default brightness of 50 is used and can be adjusted as an input when turning on light entities.

Recorder Integration:

  • Needs to be set to keep data longer than 7 days or the history stats sensors need to be set to pull data for no longer ago than the recorder is keeping data.
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Guide / Community Discussion: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/vacation-lighting-replay-historical-lighting/282435/2

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