Google assitant - notifications about failures

Apps & Services Google Assistant
1

Use case
Garage door opener with magnetic sensor showing gate state. Magnetic sensor is a device using zigbee/wifi etc.

When the magnetic sensor is not reachable/not working etc the gate status item will show wrong values. My solution:

I will use some kind of ping binding to ping the wireless device (let’s assume it’s wifi garage door dry contact with magnetic sensor wired). When i will not be able to ping this device i will asume the magnetic sensor is broken and can’t be used.
Is there a way to use google assistant (this is the main front-end for openhab) to show some warning / notification to the user about the fault?

In homekit integration i can use at example a leak sensor to warn user about some facts - ios home app pushes a notification.

Any way to achieve such result with google cloud ?

2

If openHAB can’t reach a WiFi device, I would expect the thing status to change to OFFLINE. If so, you can just check the status to determine if it’s functioning.

You could use this in a rule to update an item that’s shown in Google Home, but I don’t know how you would get Google Assistant to notify you. Maybe that’s possible in a GA rule, but I’ve never tried it.

You could definitely get a notification in the openHAB app. With the new notification actions, you could even trigger a rule that disables/enables the thing to refresh it, then resets the sensor status if the refresh fails.

Also worth noting that the GA implementation varies a little by country, so a feature that’s available for one user may not be available for another.

3

There is a special type of notification in the developers manual.

I added a :


Number          gGate_1_smoke "Sensor"                            (gGate_1)       { ga="Sensor" [ sensorName="SmokeLevel", valueUnit="PARTS_PER_MILLION", states="smoke detected=100,no smoke detected=0" ] }

Base on this sensorstate

Devices with this trait may return the following notification payload as part of a device state change. To learn more about implementing notifications, see Notifications for smart home Actions.

{
  "SensorState": {
    "priority": 0,
    "name": "SmokeLevel",
    "currentSensorState": "high"
  }
}

is it possible to use it in the integration ?

4

If that works for you with your smoke detector, you can certainly try tricking GA into sending a notification for a device failure. Your guess is as good as mine.