malcolmcdixon / computerassistant

Computer Assistant is a python program that integrates a sensor into Home Assistant to monitor whether a Windows computer is offline, online or active and display the active window using a MQTT camera.

Computer Assistant

Introduction

This project integrates into automagically using MQTT Discovery to provide an entity to show whether your computer (Windows only) is Offline, Online or Active.
You can add a MQTT Camera entity by updating your configuration.yaml file, so the currently active window is displayed in your Lovelace UI.
Commands can be published via MQTT to retrieve a current snapshot of the active window or to send a notification that will pop up using the Windows Notification system.

Installation

The simplest method to get started is to copy computerassistant.exe from releases to any folder.
Suggestion: add a shortcut to computerassistant.exe in the startup folder.

Alternatively, clone or download the source code, preferably into a virtual environment and run
$ pip install -r requirements.txt

Configuration

Ensure you have the MQTT Integration added in Home Assistant.

Launch computerassistant.exe or if running from source code enter:
$ python ca.py

The program will appear in the notification area

Select the menu item from the context menu and enter your MQTT server details and credentials in the form.

The broker address must be a valid ip address, the text input control's background will be green when valid else red if invalid.

The broker port defaults to 1883, change this to the port your MQTT broker uses (valid values 1024 to 65535).

Enter the username and password to connect to your broker.

NOTE: The project has only been tested using port 1883 and with a username and password.

When Computer Assistant connects to the MQTT broker it will publish a config message on topic homeassistant/sensor/computer-assistant/{your-computer-name}/config, this will create the device automagically in Home Assistant.

Add the device to Lovelace.

Add a MQTT Camera

Follow the MQTT Camera instructions to configure the virtual camera in your configuration.yaml.
Example

camera:
  - platform: mqtt
    topic: computer-assistant/sensor/Workstation/screenshot
    name: Workstation Active Window
    unique_id: Workstation

NOTE: Replace Workstation with your computer's name.
This will create a camera entity that you can then add to Lovelace.

How to Use

Sensor

In Lovelace UI select the Computer Assistant Sensor.

This will show the sensor details.

You can see the history of when the computer was offline, online and active.
The last active time is displayed and the currently active window if applicable.

Camera

Selecting the camera is just like any other camera feed, it will display a larger image in its own window.

Commands

There are only 2 commands, screenshot and notify, to use these publish a message via MQTT.

Screenshot

The screenshot command will instruct Computer Assistant to send an updated image of the active window.
topic:
computer-assistant/sensor/{your-computer-name}/cmd/screenshot

Notify

The notify command will create a notification in the Windows Notification topic:
computer-assistant/sensor/{your-computer-name}/cmd/notify
payload:

{ "title": "Test", "message": "A test" }

Other Settings

To adjust the various timings in Computer Assistant, select the Timings tab in the Settings dialog.

Update Frequency
Controls the interval time the program will check for activity and publish MQTT messages. Default 15 seconds.

Active Status Timeout
Controls how long before the program determines that the computer is no longer active if no mouse or keyboard events are detected. Default 120 seconds.

MQTT Connection Timeout
Controls how long before the program determines that a connection attempt to a MQTT broker has timed out. Default 30 seconds.

Roadmap

This project was initiated mainly as a programming exercise to test my recently gained knowledge of Python, to learn Qt and to send notifications to my computer from Home Assistant automations in Node-Red.

This is my first public repository on Github, the code is far from perfect but works!

I don't have any particular plans for developing other features other than automating the MQTT Camera configuration, but I'd like to have it work on Linux too. However, if there's a particular killer feature you'd like then complete a feature request.

Support

I will try to help anyone having issues installing, configuring and using Computer Assistant where possible. To obtain support please complete a bug report.