Home Assistant

Home Assistant is a hub like a Hue bridge, added from the same screen — but it brings more with it, because it pushes. Every state change arrives over a websocket, which is what makes a trigger and a value node possible where Hue has neither.

Connecting

1. Setup → Smart home → Add a hub → Home Assistant.
2. Easymatic looks for instances on your Wi-Fi; otherwise type the address, including the scheme and port — http://homeassistant.local:8123.
3. Create a long-lived access token in Home Assistant: your profile page, at the bottom, Long-lived access tokens → Create token. The screen has a button that opens that page and a Paste button beside the field.
4. Test, then name the hub.

An unencrypted address is normal on your own network, and the screen says so. Over the internet it would send your token in the clear.

Note

Signing in with OAuth is built and switched off. Home Assistant implements IndieAuth, where the client id is a URL the server fetches during authorization — so it needs a page somebody hosts, and needs your instance to reach the internet, which an air-gapped install never can. Home Assistant’s own documentation points third-party apps at a token, which is why that is the path offered.

What you get

Lights, areas and scenes drive the same three light nodes as a Hue bridge — Control light, Recall scene, Read light state — with nothing special to configure. That is what those nodes’ generality was for.

Beyond that:

Node	What it does
Home Assistant state (value)	An entity’s current state, read from a locally-cached copy
When an entity changes (trigger)	One of Home Assistant’s own triggers on an entity
When an event fires (trigger)	A named event on the bus
Call a service (action)	Any service, on any target

Why the value node is allowed to exist

Reading a Hue light is a network round trip, which a pulled value may not be. Reading a Home Assistant entity is a map lookup — the websocket pushes every change into a local cache, seeded with a full state read the moment it connects.

The bar was never “must not concern the network”; it was cheap, and cannot fail.

Like Read Variable, this node is not offered in If’s on-demand source dropdown: an on-demand read is performed with no config, and this node’s answer depends entirely on which entity was chosen. Wire it into the source port instead.

The entity trigger

When an entity changes does not filter the state stream. It asks Home Assistant what triggers that entity offers and subscribes to the one you pick — the same command Home Assistant’s own automation editor sends.

That matters because what Home Assistant offers for a media player is started_playing, paused_playing, muted and volume_crossed_threshold — a list no reading of the state API can produce. Half of it is not about state at all.

Three consequences:

• Blank means “whenever it changes” — the one built-in row, served by the state stream the cache already needs. It is there because an entity that declares no triggers, or an instance too old for the trigger platform, would otherwise leave the picker empty and the node unconfigurable.
• Only that built-in row filters. A named trigger was already evaluated by the server; re-filtering here would silently drop things like volume_changed, which report no state transition at all.
• “For at least” is sent only when you set it, because a trigger that declares no such option refuses the whole subscription rather than ignoring it.

Services

Call a service is the one place a hub is its own config field, because nothing else determines it: an entity picker already knows its hub, but “which Home Assistant” is a real question when the service has no target yet.

The service list is narrowed to what your target actually supports, and some services grow generated fields from their own definitions. That needs the websocket — a snapshot taken over the REST API alone carries neither targets nor field definitions, so it narrows nothing and generates nothing. That is degradation, not a failure.

Event type on the event trigger is the one Home Assistant field you type rather than choose, and the exception is forced: Home Assistant publishes no way to list event types, so a chooser could only offer types already seen — which excludes the one you are setting the node up for.

Three things that fail silently

Each has a test named after it, and each looks like a broken macro rather than a unit bug:

• Transition is in seconds here where the light nodes speak milliseconds. Passed through, a 400 ms fade becomes a six-minute one, which reads as the light never changing.
• Brightness is 0–255 where the nodes speak percent.
• Home Assistant answers {"success": true} to a service call it carried out against nothing at all.

The connection’s lifetime

The websocket is held for as long as the engine runs, not refcounted against armed triggers — because it also keeps the cache the value node reads. Tying it to armed triggers would make that node answer nothing in every macro that has no Home Assistant trigger in it, which is most of them.

Areas and entities are refreshed from the hub detail screen and whenever a picker opens.