With this Node-RED flow and a Home Assistant automation you will be able to check if a battery-powered device has gone missing.
The Node-RED flow will periodically (every hour, by default) check every entity, groups them by devices and look for devices that have no entities updated since at least a given amount of time (by default, 12 hours).
If any is found, the event_vanished_devices event is triggered and the Home Assistant automation will notify the users.
Open Home assistant, go to Configuration, Automations and Scenes, Automations and click Add Automation.
From there, click the menu (the three vertical dots on the top-right corner) and select Edit in YAML. In the text field, paste the content of the ha-missing-devices-automation.yaml file.
Open Node-RED and import the ha-node-red-missing-devices-flow.json flow.
You can use the following items, from the trigger.event.data object.
{
"topic": "vanished-devices",
"vanishedDevicesString": "Kitchen Light, Garage Door",
"numberOfVanishedDevices": 2,
"payload": [
{
"device_id": "25ffdc66c8e492c8fe5a90764c1056e2",
"device_name": "Kitchen Light",
"last_updated": "2021-12-17T10:25:57.224Z"
},
{
"device_id": "8c358946601611eca73c4f9016abe126",
"device_name": "Garage Door",
"last_updated": "2021-12-13T11:15:02.657Z"
}
]
}
How can I change the check interval?
On Node-RED, edit the periodic trigger node.
How can I change the time used to consider a device as vanished?
On Node-RED, edit the check for inactive devices node and change the MAX_INACTIVITY_HOURS constant.
How can I exclude a device by its ID or name?
On Node-RED, edit the check for inactive devices node and edit the SKIP_DEVICES_BY_ID and/or SKIP_DEVICES_BY_NAME constants.
How can I receive a different kind of notifications?
On Home Assistant, create an automation that is triggered by the event_vanished_devices event.
Would it be possible to do this purely on Home Assistant?
Probably it can be done as a pure Home Assistant automation (or - even better - blueprint), but it's not so easy.
First of all, you will probably need to extract the information using a template anyway, since a Python script is too limited and can't (as far as I know) gather all the information we need about entities and devices.
I have an idea for an improvement, how can I help?
Just submit a pull request. I've already created a list of issues with the first ideas that comes to mind.
Copyright 2021 Davide Alberani da@mimante.net
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