12 Home Assistant STEPS (Beginner to PRO)

today i'm going to make the video that i would have loved to watch after getting started with home assistant i'm going to take you through 12 steps that are necessary to take you from a novice to a pro now let's just roll the intro [Music] if you want to master home assistant then you're going to need to learn yaml yamo is the way that we can interact with home assistant using code and don't be scared when i say code there isn't any coding or programming language that you need to learn first of all to access the configuration files in home assistant the most common way is to use add-ons our add-ons are pieces of software that run alongside home assistant not all home assistant versions have add-ons for beginners you can use file editor the home assistant configuration file is composed of several yaml files the main yaml file is the configuration.yaml that's your starting point where you would add new integrations the ones that you can't use the user interface for automation is that yamo is the place where you're going to add all of your automations then there's several other yammers like secret.yamls where you add in your passwords groups scripts and much more all these different files are connected into one file when home assistant is reading them if you look at the configuration.yaml and take line 9 of my configuration you'll find that include groups.yaml home assistant these are not really split it just sees them as one big file so it takes the content of groups.yaml and it puts it inside a big file and it does that for every single line that you use the included you can see that i've split my automation files and more about that in step number three the key value pair concept is quite crucial the key is everything on the left of the colon and value is everything on the right so if you can see in line 13 scene that's your key and your value is everything afterwards anything that has two spaces underneath something else indicates that that is a part of so basically it is a subgroup switch over here is the key the value here is extending on several lines this piece over here represents my samsung tv now within this configuration itself you can notice two things first of all there's that dash that dash indicates that this is a list now if you only have one value you don't need the dash but if you have more than one value like i have for example underneath here i have a switchbot so that's my second value so i need another dash it doesn't matter what you use first so you could do dash name instead of doing dash platform but i'm going to keep it easier to read so i'm always putting dash platform when i have a list within this piece of code itself the concept of the key value pair continues so you see the key is mac and the value is the mac address and over here as you can see the service media player dot terminal score off is part of turn off and you can see the two dots so that's how yaml works next week i'm going to make a video on the step that is the most unclear for you so let me know in the comment section down below which one you want to make and remember to upload if you already see it there step number two is to edit your configuration files with visual studio this can make so much easier to spot mistakes especially at the beginning when you're not comfortable with yaml there's an add-on for visual studio code but if your system isn't capable of running it you can have visual studio installed on your computer and do something like a samba connection so you can build the file systems yourself now why this is so much easier is something called autocomplete now over here i'm going to add another light so i'm adding another list and you can immediately see we have some of the keywords if i type light you can see all of the lights that i have configured in my home system so i don't need to remember how i called my dining lights visual studio code also enables you to use it as a terminal which makes it super easy to install things like hacks it also helps you with errors now you can see i've added service twice and it's giving me duplicate key remember when i said everything on the left of the column is a key so i have servicing twice so you can't duplicate keys that is a key tip after the key too many times let's move on splitting configuration files is something that's going to make it a lot more easier for me and you to read you're not going to get any performance improvements with splitting files because at the end of the day home assistant is going to compile them back up again but it's going to be a lot easier for you to manage look at my automation.yaml file i have 300 lines of automations and if you scroll through this you might get confused and it's difficult to find where things are but what you can do is you can create a folder system now you can see over here i created this folder structure and i've got different things like buttons doorbells garage heating home security and i have it all nicely organized so you can create as many folders and subfolders you wish and then you can just create yaml files and in these yaml files what i recommend doing is having this sort of format you start with a dash and always indicate id id you're gonna need id for the user interface whenever you want to see things from that point of view the id and alias always keep it the same name but id needs all underscores and aliases can be fine with spaces here you can decide the orders of things so you can have trigger condition action or trigger action condition i keep it trigger condition action and then mode at the end so keep your automations descriptive as much as they can so you when you look at them in the future you actually know what they're doing if you're enjoying this video remember to like this video and subscribe to the channel for the next tip that's gonna drop next week step number four save time by using scripts now i know when you're excited you're just jumping in and creating these automations but after a while you're figuring out that you're repeating yourself scripts are just a time saver what they do is they collect several actions that you normally do in automations and it allows you to reuse them let me show you how you can achieve that notify all is one of my favorite scripts that i have in my smart home in-home system we can create custom notification to all of our devices every single automation that i need to do i would need to repeat all of these every time and that will get tiresome and also if you change your device then you have to go back and update all of your automations or if you want to add a fourth device that you purchase later you get the point it just becomes a headache the script that i got over here takes in two variables which is another thing you can do with scripts you can take in a title and a message and then i have exactly the same title and message in the automation sections in the action type call service use whatever your script name is called and over here you need to pass in the data required for your own script scripts are a massive time saver and i really recommend you using them step number five is to rename entities and devices i've got a huge amount of devices so i don't really want you to do this for every single entire device they're using but i think you should do it for every entity and device that you are planning to use and as soon as you do start using a new one then just go about renaming it because sometimes the name that comes from the system is just it just doesn't make any sense let me give you an example this acara vibration battery level so it's the battery level of the vibration sensor comes in with this weird name lumi lumi vibration power just doesn't mean anything so if you have five vibration sensors you really don't know which one to go and change so it will be just it's just a mess this is a great example over here of one that's a little bit more sensible bedroom power but what be which bedroom well does that make any sense here's another one coming directly from the 2 app cover cover.66030 what does this mean so go and rename them all if you're going to come up with a naming convention named convention standard way of naming things which i haven't personally done which i would have loved to do at the start and then i think you're really a genius but yeah that is a great idea if you've got a naming convention it's a standard way of calling things that's awesome one tip i can give you is that if it is a switch or if it's a light you will know that by everything that's before the dot so if you see switch don't put switch at the end or light or repeat light again when you do change the entity id remember also to change the name in a way that it sort of matches or it enhances it even more you can also change the icon from the icon to be a little bit different and it's going to save you a lot of time in dashboards because when you pull this into a dashboard it will automatically default to the icon that you can see over here same applies for devices and you'll find them here if you've already built a lot of automations and you want to rename them but it's going to take you a long time then do this use the search replace feature and this is quite common with notepad atom visual studio and find every time that you've mentioned the old entity id either in your dashboards or in your automation files and just control replace it step number six is to declutter your automations now when we get started we are creating all of these fancy automations half of them we just turn them off because they don't make any sense which is fine because we love to experiment here on this channel but after a while i do recommend you actually deleting them and also think about the ones that you've never actually ever used do you really want them or not you can keep them but if you keep them it could just clutter your system an easy way to find is go to your automations look at the last triggered this will give you the latest automations that have triggered but you can also switch it up in the revised so you can find that automation that haven't been on for a while and you wonder why and you can go about deleting them some of these automations have this run actions blanked out this actually means that this is an automations that have been renamed but homicide has lost a reference for it and most likely there's a duplicate so at this stage you can't run that or action so this is completely useless to go over here to the eye and just click remove entity and remove step number seven is organize better your automations so with play automations previously we've decluttered and found automation that we don't need now the first step is a crucial step so think of organizing your automations in a better way one way of doing it is actually using node-red now if you never use node-red before node-red is a gui it's user interface tool which allows you to build these nodes which are like automations and they're really cool i'm in a video that you'll find right here node-red against homicide you're going to sort of make up your own mind not many people realize that automations can have multiple actions and multiple trigger points the h stamp you can take to become a homeless system pro is to start using groups or areas depending on which one you prefer i'm personally a fan of groups and that's what i use groups are simply a collection of entities after that you rename all of your entities in a beautiful manner and you can create groups two really important groups i think that everyone should have is external door contact sensors so if you have multiple doors or multiple windows you want to group them together same with motion sensors by grouping motion sensors together you can actually find out if there's any motion in the house so it's very useful if you're away and you can find out which actual motion sensor is triggered so you can use these in dashboards to save a lot of time and space especially mentioned are also light groups light groups are a collection of lights which are certainly different than groups i've made a video about this like groups versus like groups if you want to find out more you'll find the link up top a top tip that i talk about in that video is that you can do nesting so you can have groups of groups of groups so let's say in your kitchen you have multiple lights so you want to group them together and have kitchen lights then you say the kitchen is on the ground floor you want to group all of the lights down at the ground floor and you can say ground floor lights and then you're going to say all of the lights of the house or all internal lights you can create another group and you can have all external lights and you can have all lights you can create like a pyramid of groups this is going to allow you uh to reduce repetition so if you rename or you need to add a light to your kitchen you just add it to the lower group and then all other groups are referencing it will have it automatically within so that's a cool one the next step towards being a problem system pro is to start backing up your configuration file there's two ways of doing this you can create a big snapshot and put this somewhere else either on google drive or you can just create it manually maybe every time you're doing something big download it on your pc another way is actually start using github now i know github is a lot for developers but over there you can share your code and enhance the community remember if you do do that do not share your contents with your secret or yaml or any passwords or any sensitive information like your address at least at one point everyone has broken their home assistant instance you are going to need a backup you can find backups in supervisor under backups i think i want to mention here is that in the back these backups can become a little bit big so if you have a lot of these backups you'll find that these are cluttering a lot of space so you might want to actually delete the backups once you've taken the backups and you've stored them in a safe location either on your computer and maybe multiple copies today's 10th home assistant tip is gonna be great cards great cards i love grid cards if you don't know what grid cards are they are the best way to create and organize dashboards in home system you can see over here i've got a great card that i use for my iphone and it's just one card and the one card is a grid card understanding how grid card works is gonna be crucial for your dashboard design if you are struggling with that then there's gonna be a link on top here to these full videos around 40 minutes where i actually go for when i explain and i don't know how to create dashboards with grid cards go and check that out if you don't know what grid cards are you're going to need to master grid cards the 11th tip is helpers helpers are maybe one of the most underrated features in home system but i think use in the right way can be super super cool helpers are entities that are not smart devices so these are entities that you create and you control yourself so they can't just change state you need to change their state for example you can create a guest mode and you have it on and off so you can turn on guest mode and you can disable certain announcements or you can disable certain motion sensors or alarms and you can toggle that off for example when the guests are left i'm also using it for sonos party modes when our sonos polymon toggles on and i toggle that on manually i have all of my speakers starting joining the main group as soon as i enter the room and they pick up motion another helper is the kitchen natural light and you can have a slider so that will figure out which is the threshold in which your motion tends to start turning on depending on how dark the room is the 12 home assistant tip is to create a lab home assistant or a development home assistant what's a lab home system going to do for you it's just going to make your production or your actual real system super super stable so when you do experimentation and you're learning and you're trying new things out you're most likely going to break your system and what you want to do is is have a separate environment that runs alongside your main home assistant where you can play around and do all sorts of experiments that is going to be really cool because by just learning and playing with home assistant is what's going to make you a home system pro if you want to actually see me building my whole smart home from scratch then i'm going to link the home assistant course that i made build the smart one with home assistant and with that you'll find many more courses on the platform so check the link down in the description below if you want to learn more about homicide then click this video right up here i'll see you in the next one this is geo geochow

Channel: Smart Home Makers

Views: 8,802

Keywords: home assistant, smart home, smart home makers, automation, home automation

Id: CaT3b_8vtkg

Length: 15min 40sec (940 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 25 2021