The internet is full of a lot of garbage, but there’s also some incredibly useful information out there.Home Assistant has a native integration that can scrape information from some websites and extract specific values.I scrape data from several different sites, and once I've got the data into Home Assistant, there’s a lot I can do with it.
Add How-To Geek on Google Add as Preferred Source Follow on Google Discover The local garbage collection schedule I never get the wrong collection anymore This was the first scrape that I ever set up.We get a timetable of the different garbage collection dates through the door, explaining which dates are general waste and which dates are recycling.It was always a pain having to consult the timetable, as we’d often misplace it.
The same information is published on a website, so I used Home Assistant’s scraping tools to grab the relevant information and turn it into a single sensor that reports which collection is due next.This sensor is used in multiple ways, from a spoken audio announcement through a smart speaker the night before the collection is due to a widget on my phone.We’ve not missed a collection in a long time.
Related 7 Home Assistant features I wish I’d started using sooner Long time, no scene.Posts 1 By Adam Davidson My kids’ school lunch website They love knowing what they’re having ahead of time Some days my kids have a packed lunch and other days they have a school lunch that we book and pay for in advance.It’s vital that we know which days they don’t have school lunches so we can send them in with food, and the kids also love knowing what they’re going to have that day.
The school lunches are booked through a fairly basic website.Using Home Assistant, I’m able to scrape the data that lists the meals that have been booked for my kids.This becomes part of our morning briefing.
A spoken announcement is generated each morning before we wake up, with today’s weather, any calendar events, and details of what the kids have for lunch.When we enter the kitchen in the morning, a motion sensor causes the message to play, and the kids can ask a smart speaker what they’re having for lunch if they forget.A video game deals website I get alerts when games drop below my set price I love gaming, but the price of games is crazy these days.
I can’t afford to blow $80 on a game that I’m not even sure I’m going to like.Thankfully, games often go on sale with some crazy discounts to be found, so it’s possible to pick up some bargains.Knowing when a game I wanted was on sale used to involve checking popular sales websites every day and scrolling through the list of deals.
I got bored with this, or just simply wouldn’t remember, and would miss out on short-lived deals.In the end, I got Home Assistant to help.I set up a system to scrape deal sites such as DekuDeals for data on specific games that I enter in a dedicated Home Assistant dashboard.
I set a target price, and Home Assistant will send me a phone notification once a game drops below my target price.I’ve managed to pick up some real bargains since setting it up.The only trouble is that my backlog of unplayed games continues to grow.
Local cinema listings I can look up screening times from a Home Assistant dashboard Close I can watch movies on a giant virtual movie screen on my Meta Quest VR headset, but there’s nothing quite like the real experience of going to the movie theater.Trying to find a time when the whole family is free is the hard part.The app for my local movie theater isn’t the most user-friendly I’ve ever used, so I decided to use Home Assistant to set up a better way of seeing what times movies are on.
I found that I wasn’t able to scrape the data from the official website, but I found a movie listings website that had the data I needed, and which I was able to scrape.I have a dashboard set up in Home Assistant which shows the current movies playing at my local movie theater.I can select one of those movies or enter the name, and the dashboard will show me all the upcoming times that the movie is being shown.
It’s so much quicker and easier than using the official site.Local and nationwide gigs from my favorite bands I get alerts when new concerts are announced I love music, and there’s nothing better than going to see one of your favorite bands play live.It’s not always easy to keep track of who’s on tour, and I’ve been gutted to completely miss gigs by bands I love because I didn’t know they were playing.
I use Home Assistant to scrape a music listings site that promotes concerts in my nearest city, as well as another site that covers general gig listings for the entire country.I’ve added a list of artists to monitor, and any gigs by artists from that list appear in the dashboard.If a new gig is added, I also get a notification sent to my phone telling me that there’s a new concert for a band that I’m following.
It’s proved really useful, and I’ve been able to see some awesome gigs since I started using it.Home Assistant can fetch the information you need By using the scraping tools in Home Assistant, you can access information from a huge range of web pages.It doesn’t work for every site, but for those that do, the information can be used to set up some genuinely useful tools.
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