Halloween 2021

Then it’s that time of year again, where it’s extra fun to scare someone. With a smart house, it is also almost mandatory to take advantage of the opportunities you have in automation to create something exciting.

This year we made the team a simple setup.
When someone rings the doorbell, the outdoor light flashes, and a Google home located for the occasion plays a sound. Not so advanced – but to the great delight of young and old.

The equipment consists of:

• Ring doorbell
• IKEA smart light bulb
• Google Home mini

Trigger

Actions

The first point is to turn down the volume on the Google Home mini – then you will release the weird sound that comes when it starts up.
Then turn on the Google Home mini.
Then set the correct volume as desired, e.g. 50%

Now we have a short delay for 1 second, just so Google Home mini can start.

After a one-second pause, the lights start flashing. Here we only use the effect “flash long” in Home Assistant. At the same time, we’re playing scary sounds on Google Home. Here we used a Halloween MP3 file that we downloaded from the web, and put on the Home Assistant server under the folder WWW.

The last point on the automation is to turn off Google Home, we do it to be ready for the next “victim” who rings the doorbell.

Happy Halloween

The automation that was used here:

alias: Halloween 2021
description: ''
trigger:
  - type: occupied
    platform: device
    device_id: 6abd9fd091ff4f97a44d24d596344003
    entity_id: binary_sensor.front_door_ding
    domain: binary_sensor
condition: []
action:
  - service: media_player.volume_set
    data:
      volume_level: 0
    target:
      entity_id: media_player.yourgoogle
  - service: media_player.turn_on
    target:
      entity_id: media_player.yourgoogle
  - service: media_player.volume_set
    data:
      volume_level: 0.50
    target:
      entity_id: media_player.yourgoogle
  - delay:
      hours: 0
      minutes: 0
      seconds: 1
      milliseconds: 0
  - service: light.turn_on
    data:
      flash: long
    target:
      device_id:
        - a741c6826bdc153ad87f1595a56d52f3
        - d4cb534c104ed618938b2d3445c6fa82
        - cd3b53f430443ba007aa71d56751a6d4
        - 4cc56dfc57ce910268585dd516d56913
        - 57b76e048da53d4b03b25e3870eb14b5
  - service: media_player.play_media
    data:
      media_content_id: http://192.168.68.53:8123/local/scream.mp3
      media_content_type: audio/mp3
    target:
      entity_id: media_player.yourgoogle
  - delay:
      hours: 0
      minutes: 0
      seconds: 10
      milliseconds: 0
  - service: media_player.turn_off
    target:
      device_id: 6af4e51d3cf647cda861577208a7a1ad
mode: single