A Garmin application to provide a "dashboard" to control your devices via Home Assistant. The application will never be as fully fledged as a Home Assistant dashboard, so it is designed to be good enough for the simple and essential things. Those things that can be activated via an on/off toggle or a tap. That should cover lights, switches, and anything requiring a single press such as an automation. For anything more complicated, e.g. thermostat, it would always be quicker and simpler to reach for your phone or tablet... or the device's own remote control!
The application is designed around a simple scrollable menu where menu items have been extended to interface with the Home Assistant API, e.g. to get the status of switches or lights for display on the toggle menu item. It is possible to nest menus, so there is a menu item to open a sub-menu. This can be arbitrarily deep and nested in the format of a tree of items, although you need to consider if reaching for your phone becomes quicker to select the device what you want to control.
It is important to note that your Home Assistant instance will need to be accessible via HTTPS with public SSL or all requests from the Garmin will not work. This cannot be a self-signed certificate, it must be a public certificate (You can get one for free from Let's Encrypt or you can pay for Home Assistant cloud).
Head over to the GarminHomeAssistant application page on the Connect IQ application store to download the application.
Setup for this menu is more complicated than the Connect IQ settings menu really allows you to specify. In order to make the dashboard easily configurable and easy to change, we have provided an external mechanism for specifying the menu layout, a JSON file you write, retrieved from a URL you specify. JSON was chosen over YAML because Garmin can parse JSON HTTP GET responses into its own internal dictionary, it cannot parse YAML, hence a choice of one really. Note that JSON and YAML are essentially a 1:1 format mapping except JSON does not have comments. We recommend you take advantage of Home Assistant's own web server to provide the JSON definition. The advantage here are:
- the file is as public as you make your Home Assistant,
- the file is editable within Home Assistant via "Studio Code Server", and
- the schema is verifiable using JSON Schema.
We have used /config/www/garmin/<something>.json on our Home Assistant's file system. That equates to a URL of https://homeassistant.local/local/garmin/<something>.json.
Schema verification is a big part of this design choice. If the application cannot read your menu definition, there's a limited amount of debug it can reasonable provide on a small screen. That responsibility now falls to you and the schema checker for help.
Example schema as shown in the images:
{
"$schema": "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/house-of-abbey/GarminHomeAssistant/main/config.schema.json",
"title": "Home",
"items": [
{
"entity": "script.food_on_table",
"name": "Food is Ready!",
"type": "tap",
"service" : "script.turn_on"
},
{
"entity": "light.bedside_light_switch",
"name": "Bedroom Light",
"type": "toggle"
},
{
"entity": "light.living_room_lights_all",
"name": "Lounge Lights",
"type": "toggle"
},
{
"entity": "menu.each_lounge_light",
"name": "Each Lounge Light",
"title": "Lounge",
"type": "group",
"items": [
{
"entity": "light.standard_lamp",
"name": "Standard Lamp",
"type": "toggle"
},
{
"entity": "light.bookcase_light",
"name": "Bookcase Lamp",
"type": "toggle"
},
{
"entity": "light.corner_table_light",
"name": "Corner Table Lamp",
"type": "toggle"
}
]
},
{
"entity": "switch.bc_usbs",
"name": "Bookcase USBs",
"type": "toggle"
},
{
"entity": "automation.garage_door_check",
"name": "Garage Door Check",
"type": "toggle"
},
{
"entity": "automation.turn_off_usb_chargers",
"name": "Turn off USBs",
"type": "tap",
"service" : "automation.trigger"
},
{
"entity": "scene.tv_light",
"name": "TV Lights Scene",
"type": "tap",
"service": "scene.turn_on"
}
]
}NB. Entity names are not real in case anyone's a hacker.
The example above illustrates how to configure:
- Light or switch toggles
- Automation enable toggles
- Script invocation (tap)
- Service invocation, e.g. Scene setting, (tap)
- A sub-menu to open (tap)
The example JSON shows an example usage of each of these Home Assistance entity types. Presently, an automation is the only one that can be either a 'tap' or a 'toggle'.
| HA Type | Tap | Toggle |
|---|---|---|
| Switch | ❌ | ✅ |
| Light | ❌ | ✅ |
| Automation | ✅ | ✅ |
| Script | ✅ | ❌ |
| Scene | ✅ | ❌ |
NB. All 'tap' items must specify a 'service' tag.
Possible future extensions might include specifying the alternative texts to use instead of "On" and "Off", e.g. "Locked" and "Unlocked" (but wouldn't having locks operated from your watch be a security concern ;-))
The schema is checked by using a URL directly back to this GitHub source repository, so you do not need to install that file. You can just copy & paste your entity names from the YAML configuration files used to configure Home Assistant. With a submenu, there's a difference between "title" and "name". The "name" goes on the menu item, and the "title" at the head of the submenu. If your dashboard definition fails to meet the schema, the application will simply drop items with the wrong field names without warning.
Having created your JSON definition for your dashboard, you need to create an API key for your personal account on Home Assistant.
Having created that token, before you dismiss the dialogue box with the value you will never see again, copy it somewhere safe. You need to paste this into the Garmin Application's settings.
- Paste your API key you've just created into the top field.
- Add the URL for your Home Assistant API, e.g.
https://<homeassistant>/api. (No trailing slash `/`` character as one gets appended when creating the URL and you do not want two.) - Add the URL of your JSON file, e.g.
https://<homeassistant>/local/garmin/<something>.json.
You should now have a working application on your watch and be able to operate your Home Assistant devices for as long as your watch is within Bluetooth range of your phone.
Its obvious that a toggle menu item has been triggered as the visible switch changes position and colour. Less obvious is that you have successfully triggered a tap operation.
The application will display a 'toast' showing Home Assistant's friendly name of the triggered item. The toast will disappear after a short while if not dismissed by the user.
Home Assistant will inevitably change the state of devices you are also controlling via your Garmin. The Garmin application does not maintain a web socket to listen for changes. Instead it must poll the Home Assistant API with your key. Therefore the application is not that responsive to changes. Instead there will be a delay of multiples of 100 ms per item whose status needs to be checked and amended.
The per toggle item delay is caused by a queue of responses to web requests filling up a queue and giving a Communications.BLE_QUEUE_FULL response code. For a Venu 2 Garmin watch an API call delay of 600 ms was found to be sustainable (500 ms was still too fast). The code now chains a sequence of updates, so as one finishes it invokes the next item's update. The more items requiring a status update that you pack into your dashboard, the slower each individual item will be updated!
The thinking here is that the watch application will only ever be open briefly not persistently, so the delay in picking up state changes won't be observed often for any race condition between two controllers.
As a consequence of this update mechanism, if you request changes too quickly you will be notified that your device cannot keep up with the rate of API responses and you will have to dismiss the error in order to continue. The is a feature not a bug!
When you change the JSON file defining your dashboard, you must exit the application and the reopen it. It only takes a matter of a few seconds to pick up the new definition, but it is not automatic.
| Version | Comment |
|---|---|
| 1.0 | Initial release for 26 devices. |
| 1.1 | Updated for 54 more devices, 80 in total. Scene support. Added vibrate acknowledgement for tap-based menu items. Falls back to a custom visual confirmation in the absence of 'toast' and vibrate support. Bug fix for large menus needing status updates. |
| 1.2 | Do not crash on zero items to update. Report unreachable URLs. Verify API URL does not have a trailing slash '/'. Increased HTTP response diagnosis. Reduced minimum API Level required from 3.3.0 to 3.1.0 to allow more device "part numbers" to be satisfied. |
| 1.3 | Tap for scripts was working in emulation but not on some phones. Decision is to make the 'service' field in the JSON compulsory for 'tap' menu items. This is a breaking change, but for many might be a fix for something not working correctly. Improve language support, we can now accept language corrections and prevent the automated translation of strings from clobbering manually refined entries. Thank you to two new contributors. |