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Home Assistant

Home Assistant Control and Notifications on Your PC

Chris West

• 3 min read
Home Assistant Control and Notifications on Your PC

Hass.Agent on your Windows PC tied together with Home Assistant can do a LOT of things. Controlling aspects of your PC from Home Assistant and controlling entities in Home Assistant from your PC are just a few of those things.

HASS.Agent is a Windows-based client (companion) application for Home Assistant, developed in .NET 6. Here are the core features of Hass.Agent.

Notifications: receive notifications, show them using Windows built-in toast popups, and optionally attach images.

Media Player: use HASS.Agent as a mediaplayer device: see and control what's playing and send text-to-speech.

  • This requires the installation of the HASS.Agent MediaPlayer integration.
  • Quick Actions: use a keyboard shortcut to quickly pull up a command interface, through which you can control Home Assistant entities - or, assign a keyboard shortcut to individual Quick Actions for even faster triggering.
  • Commands (currently 21): control your PC (or other Windows-based devices) through Home Assistant using custom- or built-in commands.
  • Sensors (currently 29): send your PC's sensors to Home Assistant to monitor every aspect of your device.
  • WebView: quickly show any website, anywhere - no browser required, for instance, a HA dashboard.
  • Satellite Service: use the service to collect sensor data and execute commands, even when you're not logged in.
  • All entities are dynamically acquired from your Home Assistant instance.
  • Commands and sensors are automatically added to your Home Assistant instance.

Installation of Hass.Agent is super simple. Download the installer and go. If you are missing some requirements, such as .NET, the installer will prompt you to install those missing components. Installation of Hass.Agent Notifier and Hass.Agent MediaPlayer can be done through HACS. They can also be installed manually if you choose.

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Note: This is a Windows-only application. It is not available for Linux or Mac. Details about the reasons for this are on the Hass.Agent github page.

Hass.Agent has the ability to set hotkeys to send commands to Home Assistant as well as just opening the main screen.

Hass.Agent Main Screen

Initial configuration is done during "Onboarding" in the installation process. However, all of those same settings can be accessed via the configuration menus.

Configuration screen in Hass.Agent

Most of the entities in Home Assistant are exposed to Hass.Agent which means that you can control all of them directly from Windows, and with hotkeys. How amazing is that?!

Home Assistant domains that Hass.Agent can see and interact with.

Along the same lines, there are tons of Windows sensors that are available to send over to Home Assistant. You can control your PC as well as log things such as CPU usage, battery percentage remaining, Webcam status, etc.

List of sensors that can be used and sent to Home Assistant. There are even more not even shown here.
Commands that can be accessed via Hass.Agent. Allows control of your PC from Home Assistant.

I cover more detail in my video. Please take a moment and give it a watch. If you're not a subscriber to my YouTube channel, I would really appreciate if you would hit that subscribe button while you are over there. You can also join the channel if you like what I do and want to support growing the channel.

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