Monitor Zero battery charging from within Home Assistant with an old/unused Android phone.
Thanks to Boris Schaedler's ZeroSpy application, an old/unused Android phone can be repurposed into a Zero charging monitoring tool that can publish its info to a URL (I used thingspeak to send the information to the cloud and a REST sensor on Home Assistant to recover the information).
Since February 28th, Boris added the ability to post a JSON message along with the called URL along with new triggers.
This gives us much more control over what is actually happening during the charge but also allows us to publish that information locally to Home Assistant via a Webhook, without needing an Internet connection.
This guide aims at helping the Home Assistant enthusiasts but I guess webhooks must be available on pretty much any other platform.
In order to control the charge of the battery based on the ZeroSpy information, I use a very compact 16A Blitzwolf BW-SHP1 power relay and the excellent zigbee2mqtt.
Install the Zero Motorcycle app on your old Android phone and get it connected to the bike. Then install ZeroSpy.
Connect ZeroSpy to your bike using Bluetooth and you should soon see your bike data appear on the screen:
In the settings, I left everything unchecked except Keep Screen On:
In the auto connect menu (cogwheel on the main screen), I checked both Auto Connect and Connect After Boot:
When the trigger condition is met, a URL can be called along with a JSON body.
I set 4 different triggers:
From here, ZeroSpy will issue POST calls with the requested information every time a trigger condition is met.
An easy way to recover information locally and securely is to use webhooks. These tokens can be referenced in automations as triggers and the attached JSON data can be easily retrieved.
Home assistant webhooks have to be called using the following URL type:
https://your home assistant instance:port/api/webhook/webhook id
where:
port: 8123 by default webhook id: random hex number, up to 64 characters that will be used as trigger in an automation
On a Linux machine, you can easily generate a random token:
openssl rand -hex 32
Alternately, you can use Password Safe on Windows (Password policy tab - Password length: 64 characters, Use Hexadecimal digits only)
In my example as well as in the screenshots, I used a totally insecure but easy to type abcdef token. Replace it by your own secure token in both the automation and ZeroSpy.
Use the following yaml to retrieve the JSON information provided by ZeroSpy:
trigger:
platform: webhook
webhook_id: abcdef
variables:
what: "{{ trigger.json.event }}"
soc: "{{ trigger.json.SoC }}"
connected: "{{ trigger.json.connected }}"
valid: "{{ not 'connection issue' in evenement }}"
Have a look at webhook.yaml for a commplete automation example.