Name: GarminHomeAssistant (Application)
Rating: 4.7 (149 reviews)
Author: PhilipAbbey

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Warning! Those who fail to read the copious documentation provided tend to look really silly when making a bad review (and we call you out by reply).

NB. The widget version of this application is available as a separate item in the App Store at https://apps.garmin.com/en-US/apps/559f5174-177f-4f46-b170-f31c7e74dea3 .

A Garmin application to provide a "dashboard" to control your devices via Home Assistant, https://www.home-assistant.io/. 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 some things it will 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 (https://developers.home-assistant.io/docs/api/rest/ ), 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.

The intended audience for this application are those comfortable with configuring a HomeAssistant (e.g. editing the YAML configuration files) and debugging why URLs don't work. It does not require programming skills, but the menu is configured via JSON which feels like "coding".

It is important to note that your homeassistant 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 homeassistant cloud).

Configuration instructions are provided via the GitHub repository at https://github.com/house-of-abbey/GarminHomeAssistant/blob/main/README.md. This is essential reading due to the need to configure a "dashboard" via a JSON definition file served from your Home Assistant instance. Discussion and support will be offered via the Home Assistant Community at https://community.home-assistant.io/t/home-assistant-app-for-garmin/637348 .

Need Help?
1. Read the instructions, https://github.com/house-of-abbey/GarminHomeAssistant/blob/main/README.md
2. Did you copy & paste the settings? Don't re-type its too error prone!
3. Read the known issues, https://github.com/house-of-abbey/GarminHomeAssistant/blob/main/README.md#known-issues
4. Self help from the the trouble shooting guide, https://github.com/house-of-abbey/GarminHomeAssistant/blob/main/TroubleShooting.md
5. Community help from Home Assistant Forums, https://community.home-assistant.io/t/home-assistant-app-for-garmin/637348
6. Double check your settings for copy & paste errors, and your JSON passes both formatting and schema checks.
7. Contact the authors, but be prepared to be embarrassed if its something in the instructions ;-)

More fully thought out bug reports and feature requests best go via the GitHub project (https://github.com/house-of-abbey/GarminHomeAssistant/issues ) please, after you have checked previous posts on the forum and previously closed issues. Check for known issues at https://github.com/house-of-abbey/GarminHomeAssistant/blob/main/README.md#known-issues.

This application is offered FREE to the community in order to give back to it when we have personally taken so much from the contribution of others. Comes with a full money back guarantee ;-) Please be kind and helpful with your feedback! Or better still offer code contributions to the project.