HASS Workstation Service

This goal of this project is to provide useful sensors and services from your workstation to Home Assistant through MQTT. It accomplishes this goal by:

• Running in the background as a service
• Being lightweight so you'll never notice it
• Using well defined standards
• Being local when you want it to, only communicating through your own MQTT broker
• Being easy to configure
• Using secure communication

It will try to futher accomplish this goal in the future by:

• Being platform independent

Screenshots

Not convinced yet? Check out this excellent video by GeekToolkit on YouTube.

Installation

You can get the installer from here. When using the installer, the application checks for updates on startup. This is the recommended way to install for most users. Note: You'll get a Windows Smartscreen warning because the code was self signed. You can click "More info" and then "Run anyway" to proceed with installing.

Standalone

If you don't want to use the installer, standalone is what you need. Make sure to install .NET 5 Runtime first. Find the standalone version releases on GitHub here. Unpack all files to a folder and run hass-workstation-service.exe. This is the background service and you can use UserInterface.exe to configure the service. There is no automatic (or prompted) updating in the standalone version.

Getting Started

As a prerequisite, make sure you have an MQTT username and password available. Using Home Assistant in combination with the Mosquitto broker add-on and integration? You can both use a Home Assistant account and a local account. From a security perspective, we recommend a local account as this only provides access to the MQTT Broker and not to your Home Assistant instance.

Now that you are all set, make sure to run the hass-workstation-service.exe executable first. This executable is responsible for setting up the sensors and talking with your MQTT Broker. To configure the service, start the UserInterface.exe executable. Add your hostname or IP address, port, username and password and click on Save. In case you use the Mosquitto add-in, provide port 8883 and check Use TLS. The application will mention "All good" when configured correctly.

Updating

If you used the installer, the app checks for updates on startup. If an update is available you will be prompted to install. If you use the standalone, just delete all files from the previous install and unpack the zip to the same location as before.

Need help?

Find us on Discord.

Development

Want to develop or build the application yourself? Make sure to install the .NET Runtime .NET 5 Runtime and .NET 5 SDK. Run the following commands from the hass-workstation-service\hass-workstation-service directory to get you started:

dotnet build
dotnet publish

In case you are using Visual Studio Code, open the hass-workstation-service\hass-workstation-service folder to take advantage of the predefined build and publish tasks.

Sensors

The application provides several sensors. Sensors can be configured with a name and this name will be used in the MQTT topic like this: homeassistant/sensor/{DeviceName}/{Name}/state. Sensors will expose themselves through MQTT discovery and will automatically appear in Home assistant or any other platform that supports this type of configuration.

Sensors publish their state on their own interval which you can configure and only publish when the state changes.

UserNotificationState

This sensor watches the UserNotificationState. This is normally used in applications to determine if it is appropriate to send a notification but we can use it to expose this state. Notice that this status does not watch Focus Assist. It has the following possible states:

State	Explanation
NotPresent	A screen saver is displayed, the machine is locked, or a nonactive Fast User Switching session is in progress.
Busy	A full-screen application is running or Presentation Settings are applied. Presentation Settings allow a user to put their machine into a state fit for an uninterrupted presentation, such as a set of PowerPoint slides, with a single click.
RunningDirect3dFullScreen	A full-screen (exclusive mode) Direct3D application is running.
PresentationMode	The user has activated Windows presentation settings to block notifications and pop-up messages.
AcceptsNotifications	None of the other states are found, notifications can be freely sent.
QuietTime	Introduced in Windows 7. The current user is in "quiet time", which is the first hour after a new user logs into his or her account for the first time. During this time, most notifications should not be sent or shown. This lets a user become accustomed to a new computer system without those distractions. Quiet time also occurs for each user after an operating system upgrade or clean installation.
RunningWindowsStoreApp	A Windows Store app is running.

ActiveWindow

This sensor exposes the name of the currently focused window.

WebcamActive

This sensor shows if the webcam is currently being used. It uses the Windows registry to check will work from Windows 10 version 1903 and higher.

MicrophoneActive

This sensor shows if the microphone is currently being used. It uses the Windows registry to check and will work from Windows 10 version 1903 and higher.

CPULoad

This sensor checks the current CPU load. It averages the load on all logical cores every second and rounds the output to two decimals.

GPULoad

This sensor returns the current GPU load. This should work for both NVidia and AMD GPU's.

GPUTemperature

This sensor returns the current temperature of the GPU in °C. This should work for both NVidia and AMD GPU's.

UsedMemory

This sensor calculates the percentage of used memory.

CurrentClockSpeed

This sensor returns the BIOS configured baseclock for the processor.

WMIQuery

This advanced sensor executes a user defined WMI query and exposes the result. The query should return a single value.

For example:

SELECT * FROM Win32_Processor

returns

|64|9|To Be Filled By O.E.M.|3|Intel64 Family 6 Model 94 Stepping 3|252|1|Win32_Processor|4008|12|64|Intel64 Family 6 Model 94 Stepping 3|CPU0|100|198|1024|8192|0|6|4|GenuineIntel|4008|Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6700K CPU @ 4.00GHz|4|4|8|To Be Filled By O.E.M.|False|BFEBFBFF000506E3|3|24067|CPU|False|To Be Filled By O.E.M.|U3E1|OK|3|Win32_ComputerSystem|GAME-PC-2016|8|1|False|False|

This cannot not be used for this sensor. Instead try

SELECT CurrentClockSpeed FROM Win32_Processor

which results in 4008 for my PC.

You can use WMI Explorer to find see what data is available.

Here's some queries from other users:

Query	Explanation	Thanks
SELECT username FROM Win32_ComputerSystem	Shows the current user	@grizzlyjere

Want to add you query here? Please create a pull request or open an issue.

LastActive

This sensor returns the date/time that the workstation was last active. Typing or moving your mouse will reset the date/time.

LastBoot

This sensor returns the date/time that Windows was last booted.

SessionState

This sensor returns the current session state. It has the following possible states:

State	Explanation
Locked	All user sessions are locked.
LoggedOff	No users are logged in.
InUse	A user is currently logged in.
Unknown	Something went wrong while getting the status.

CurrentVolume

This sensor returns the volume of the currently playing audio. So if you're listening to music and you pause, this sensor will return 0 (or at least a very low value).

Dummy

This sensor spits out a random number every second. Useful for testing, maybe you'll find some other use for it.

Commands

Commands can be used to trigger certain things on the client. For each command, a switch will be available in Home Assistant. Turning on the switch fires the command on the client and it will turn the switch off when it's done. Turning it off will cancel the running command.

ShutdownCommand

This command shuts down the computer immediately. It runs shutdown /s.

RestartCommand

This command restarts the computer immediately. It runs shutdown /r.

LogOffCommand

This command logs off the current user. It runs shutdown /l.

CustomCommand

This command allows you to run any Windows Commands. The command will be run in a hidden Command Prompt. Some examples:

Command	Explanation
Rundll32.exe user32.dll,LockWorkStation	This locks the current session.
shutdown /s /t 300	Shuts the PC down after 5 minutes (300 seconds).
C:\path\to\your\batchfile.bat	Run the specified batch file.

KeyCommand

Sends a keystroke with the specified key. You can pick any of these key codes.

Media Commands

There's several media commands available which are very self exlanatory.

• Play/Pause
• Next
• Previous
• Volume up
• Volume down
• Mute (toggle)

Credits

This project depends on work done by others and they should at least get a mention. Please note that this list is not complete yet.

CoreAudio

CoreAudio was used to check the current volume of playing audio.

LibreHardwareMonitor

We use this for our GPU sensors.