COMPLETE GUIDE TO HOME ASSISTANT - 2023 Edition

if you're looking to set up a new home assistant installation this is the video for you now I've found two problems with most of the videos out there and that is number one they get stale really quickly and that's because there's so many people that are constantly changing this platform that if you're looking at a video from a year ago chances are your experience is going to be different than what you saw in that video the second issue is that the videos tend to be very focused on a specific topic and it's hard for a newbie to understand what to watch first and what order do I need to do things and you spend hours and hours and get frustrated and believe me I know I spent hours on this several times over the past year and I bailed on it bailed on it so this time I'm committed I'm gonna go through it and set up my own home assistant instance and I want you to come along and that way you will understand how it's done from start to finish this will be a long video and I will put chapter time codes down in the video description so you can skip anything that's not applicable to you okay let's get to it [Music] all right let's talk about installation on a Raspberry Pi it is really pretty simple I'm here on the home assistant website if you go to documentation and installation you can see there's a whole bunch of different methods that it supports installation on but I really like using the home assistant operating system and installing it on a dedicated computer and that could be as simple as a single board computer like a Raspberry Pi so if you want to go the Raspberry Pi route I will warn you they are hard to get not impossible but hard and there's a big secondary market and people are jacking up the prices but if you want to get one at the list price which is around thirty five dollars for a Raspberry Pi I suggest you get to know rpilocator.com that's this website you see here behind me and here you can see if you go to this every day it shows you various different pies that are available and where they are being sold and they even provide links you can get to each one of them now it's really tough in the U.S so if you're in the U.S you're going to have a hard time but I did it I sat here and I waited until I saw one that was available at Adafruit this is the one that I bought it's a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B now this one is from 2015 but I assure you it still works great and it works fine for home assistant too you're also going to need your power supply with a micro USB on it this one happens to be two and a half amps you also need a an SD card and the SD card just installs right here and this is the part that is almost like magic all you're gonna do is pop this in this is my little card reader here in my computer and we say we want to install this on the Raspberry Pi okay it gives you suggested Hardware things like that but what you're gonna do is you're gonna burn on that SD card you're going to install the operating system home assistant operating system on that SD card now if you click this link here it actually takes you to the page to download etcher now depending upon the Raspberry Pi that you're using there's a different URL here so I'm going to copy this one for the Raspberry Pi 3. just gonna copy that or you can click this little button here and then I'm going to say Flash from URL and just make sure that's the right one there okay and here you can see my 256 gigabyte SD card I'm going to select that and just say flash it is going to overwrite so I'm going to say yes I'm sure password all right now I had this situation before I'm using a Mac and so this for some reason doesn't like doing the URL so what I'm going to do is take this file this this name and I'm going to put it up here and it downloads it automatically to my downloads folder then I'm going to say Flash from file and this is the one that I want R Pi 3 I'm going to select my target yes I'm sure and now it should work okay and when it's done you can see that it says the disk that it's is inserted is not readable by this computer that's normal because it is not a Mac file so I'm going to eject it okay now I'm just going to take the SD card pop it in here I'm going to plug in my power and then of course I need a network cable and then I'm just going to plug this in over here here you can see the little flashy lights that give an indication that it's on and active that's what the green light means its activity and you should also see the network light is blinking as well okay at this point I've flashed it and started up The Pie and it says you can go to homeassistant.local colon one 8123 and just wait for that to come up and I'll just keep clicking reload until it does and there it is literally that was it I didn't I didn't pause it so you can see it says it takes up to 20 minutes for this to uh do its initialization and I'll be back now although you can use a Raspberry Pi as the computer for your home system installation I don't think you should I really think the best approach is to use and what they call an x86 computer this is a computer that has an Intel chip in it sometimes you'll see them as Intel Nooks and this happens to be an N5 cell run processor that's in this which is way faster than the Raspberry Pi and it's not that expensive in fact this entire machine with the power supply was 169 dollars and it came with a 256 gigabyte SSD and 8 gig of RAM I'll put a link to it down in the video description it's really a nice simple machine that that works really well for home assistant now there's two ways to get home assistant on this machine and I'm going to go through both of them right now so the first and and honestly you're going to need a spare Monitor and keyboard and mouse to plug into it because you're going to need to boot into the bios so I happen to have a mouse and I happen to have a keyboard whoops sorry hit my microphone so the first thing you're going to need to do is get yourself a flash drive that you can put Ubuntu on and that's because we're going to use this to boot Ubuntu on this computer and then we're gonna we're gonna use etcher to burn home assistant on this computer now this is the harder process I'm going to go through an easier process after this but this one is free other than the cost of the jump drive you know the the flash drive this process is free but if you want to save time I'll show you another way so let me just take a moment and plug these things in here all right so I'm going to take my Ubuntu and I'm going to plug it in the front and I've got my keyboard and mouse plugged in the back and now I'm just going to power this on and I'm going to immediately start pressing F7 on here would help if I plugged in the HDMI port okay so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go into setup and in the setup here is where I've got a couple of things I need to check on the first is security and for a secure boot I need that disabled okay that's number one and the number two is for the boot you need to have the UEFI boot working here save changes and reset okay at this point I don't know if you can see it but hopefully you can see that it says try or install Ubuntu okay so I'm going to do that I'm going to click enter and here it is booting Ubuntu and this is going to take a bit so I'll be back alrighty so you can see it has booted Ubuntu and you don't want to say install Ubuntu you want to say try Ubuntu okay and with this I'm gonna come here all right I'm gonna actually go to my website handydad.tv slash h-a-o-s Dash Ubuntu we're having trouble finding that site why it would help if I plugged in my network cable okay so this is my page on my website and these are the commands that we're going to execute and to execute those commands we're going to go to a terminal so let's find terminal there we go so all I'm gonna do is I'm going to take each one of those commands and I'm going to copy them and paste them over hopefully you can see that better now you can type these but I'm lazy so I'm just pasting them in okay at this point Belina etcher should be installed so the one thing I'm going to do is I'm going to come over here to home assistant dot IO and I'm going to go back to that page so I can get to that I'm going to come in here where it says generic X 86-64. and in here it gives you all the the boot mode disable secure boot and right now I am following this uh how to use it a live operating system on a USB drive that's this step right here this is what I'm following and so at this point I'm going to be able to run Elena etcher on here there it is and I need the URL which is right here copy that and I'm going to flash from URL paste in that URL and now when I select Target it's going to select I'm going to say show hidden because this is the SSD installed and I'm going to do that and this is where the system Drive is so it's giving me an extra warning here because it basically says hey you're overwrite in the operating system that came with that machine and I know that and I'm saying yes I want to do that so yes I'm sure and now it is writing okay that is done now I'm going to come over here to tell it to power off all right it says please remove the installation media and then press enter so I'm going to pull that hit enter and now it should power off okay now with Ubuntu removed I should be able to power it on and here you can see home assistant because I still have the uh the monitor hooked up normally you don't see this you don't need a monitor at all to run home assistant all right so that's that's the first method on how you can create a bootable x86 computer with home assistant now I'm going to show you an easier approach but it costs a little bit of money okay this process involves going inside and what you have here is this is the SSD that's the basically the uh the hard drive and this is the 8 gig of RAM that's in here so what I'm going to do is actually remove this and we're going to burn or we're going to etch the home assistant operating system directly on this drive that's how we're going to do it and to do that we're going to use this little Gizmo right here which I think I bought for about 17 dollars and but it simplifies this process so much easier I gotta tell you all I'm going to do is let's see take this out foreign pop it in here okay that's it and then that can plug in here all right so this is the URL for the generic x8664 right I'm going to copy that open a new tab put that in there and it is going to download that image file then I'm going to come in here and I'm going to say Flash from file and pick that file that I just downloaded and my target is going to be my 256 gigabyte SSD card and I'm going to say Flash yes I'm sure put in my password Here and now it is flashing you gotta admit that is so much easier than doing that whole rigmarole with Ubuntu it just means you have to pay an extra 17 for that little Gizmo what's your time worth that's really what it comes down to and now you can see the light has gone off here I can unplug this pop it back in here and then pop this back on as well all right at this point it is done with its preliminary boot up whatever it is and I'm going to create a user account for myself and I'm also going to detect my location and that is it's a quick way for it to select what country you're in and I use the US customary and US Dollars you know so this is going to be Fahrenheit all my all my temperature and whatnot is going to be in Fahrenheit so I really recommend that and I don't usually check any of these things and it already found some things on my network but uh that's okay I'm going to ignore that for now all right and this is it we're into uh home assistant all right if I click on my name down here my user account this gives any kind of preferences from my specific account you can see by default I have it here is the dark I can also change it to light so if yours starts up and you're in light mode you can come in and change it to dark mode it's all a matter of preference the other thing I recommend is clicking advanced mode that unlocks some additional features that do come in handy and that's it when you first come into home assistant this is your dashboard which is the it just says overview and there's just your user account there's a tab for that and there's also a a widget here for your forecast weather forecast that is and any other devices that you want to add to your dashboard will get added here we'll talk about dashboards a little bit later but for now let me just give you a quick overview one of the most popular things you're going to do when you first boot up home assistant and get started is you're going to go into settings and within settings you've got devices and services and this is where you're going to see all those Integrations that it it s covered from the get-go anything that home assistant finds on your network it will automatically add and show up in here now you still have to configure it but it detects like it knows that I have a rochio sprinkler control okay I could set that up right now it knows that there's a Lutron caseta Hub on my network and it knows that I have two-year devices so I could if I wanted to set these things up right now but I don't want to I'm going to do things my way what's important to me is Z-Wave and zigbee so first I'm going to set up Z-Wave now regardless of what you're going to set up whether it be Z-Wave or zigbee or anything else for that matter it's going to communicate usually through some kind of a radio transmitter that works with that specific protocol so for example this one here I have is a Z-Wave stick this is an aotech Z-Wave z-stick and it's a gen 5. they also I think they're up to gen 7 if not Greater by now but I've had this one for a while now I have also I've done the research and I know that this device is compatible with home assistant so that's one way to ensure success is to make sure if you are going to purchase a Z-Wave connection or a zigbee connection you know whatever those dongles are you want to make sure you find ones that are supported so all I'm going to do at this point I'm going to put this one in the front USB and then this stick you can just see these lights on here they just um they just cycle through that's just the way this stick is I ignore them at this point now I'm going to switch back to the desktop here and right off the bat you can see it discovered this device TTY ACM zero is actually the device name on my computer there and so it knows it's a Z-Wave stick and it's asking me do I want to configure this so I'm going to say yes and it's just going to confirm and I'm going to say submit at this point I'm going to leave these blank and that's it now it says the z-stick is set up and it's asking me what area it's in I can put it in an area if I want I can just say all right I'm going to add a new area and I'm going to call this one office not that it really matters but you can set things up in your house with specific areas okay now to demonstrate the setup of a Z-Wave device I have here a Z-Wave smart plug this is an aotech Smart Switch six I'm sure there's a newer version of that but it's pretty straightforward all I'm going to do is plug it in and you can see the colors rotate that indicates that it is not connected to a network at this point so then I'm going to come to my desktop and I'm going to go into my Z-Wave configuration and I'm going to click add a device and it says it's searching for Z-Wave devices and over here all I'm going to do is click the power button and it does that Blinky blink and over on the screen it says the device has been added devices you can see I have the Smart Switch here and the Smart Switch has you can hear that little click and here in fact I will help make it a little easier to see I'm going to plug that in there flip the switch here and you can see how quickly I'm clicking the mouse and it's going on pretty much instantaneously okay I'm flipping this switch right here that's what's doing it alright so that is the setup of my Z-Wave device all right let me show you how to remove a Z-Wave device if I come into the configuration page here you can see this button that says remove device and when I start the exclusion mode I then just have to push that same button on my my light here and it will go back to let me pull this see how it is circling those colors again and that is how you do it it is no longer there when I go to devices it is no longer there so that's how you do Z-Wave all right the next thing I want to do is put in my sonoff zigbee this is a zigbee 3.0 dongle and this is the zigbee 3.0 dongle Plus all right there's a couple versions of this but the plus is the older version and this one is more compatible it's not like the new one is not compatible but it's this one is more compatible so I'm going to plug this into my USB in the back and then I'm going to switch over to the screen and let's go into our devices and services and in here you'll see it discovered that dongle so all I have to do is Click configure and it says you want to set this up and I'm going to say yes now this is a clear example of some functionality that has gotten much better over time because I don't need to know anything about what the device name is and what the path is and I don't need to touch yaml at all everything was done through the user interface so at this point a network formation choose the network okay I'm just going to leave it as erase network settings and create a new network and that's fine now this is called zigbee home automation this is the one that's built right in to home assistant there is also a popular alternative that was developed by a third party it is open source so it is freely available it's called zigbee to mqtt now that involves setting up a mosquito mqtt broker and the process is a little bit more complicated you also have to go to the add-on store and we haven't talked about add-ons yet but you have to pull that down as an add-on it does not happen automatically why would people do it well from what I understand there are some limitations with the Zha the the zigbee home assistant and integration that the built-in zigbee is not as I don't know it doesn't doesn't allow as much flexibility as zigbee to MT mqtt so if you use eha by default is what I would say if for some reason one of your devices is not compatible or there are capabilities of the device that maybe are not showing up so for example if you have a multi-sensor and you don't see the light settings maybe that's something that zigbee Tempe TT can help you with but they're mutually exclusive you're not going to have both so if you want to use that you can do that just make sure you delete the Zha first so I'm going to say the same thing put that one in the office and finish now let's talk about setting that up so here I have a zigbee smart plug this is a third reality and I'm just going to plug this in over here and let's see how we can set that up too and I'm going to come into configure and I'm going to say add device and it's searching for zigbee devices now this one I don't know if you can see it but the light on here there's a little light on here that was blinking rapidly when I first plugged it in and because I was in pairing mode it found it and it already paired it in see it says devices regularly ready to use now I can put this in an area if I want or I can ignore it and I don't know how long this keeps searching for zigbee devices but you can add multiple devices here regardless I'm going to go back to my device list and here I can see my third reality and you can hear the click I'll plug in my little light bulb here and just like before click it goes on and off really quickly figure out how would we remove a zigbee device and this is a little bit different I'm going to go into devices and in here when I say remove it will remove it from the zigbee network too I don't have to put it into exclusion mode so I say yes it's gone and I unplug it right away because otherwise it will onboard it again There You Go full circle how to add zigbee devices and how to remove them okay now what I've done is I've brought back both of those devices my Z-Wave devices this one is the zigbee and this one is the Z-Wave that way you could tell that they're both working and I have another device that I'm going to set up here this is called I know it's a little dark but uh here I'll hold it up this is called an aotech Walmart quad it is a Z-Wave device wireless obviously but it's rechargeable as well so I'm going to come in here I'm going to go into my Z-Wave and say add a device and then I'm going to push there's a little button on the back of it I'm just going to push that little button and the light's going to Blink and you can see it is adding that device now I'm doing this because I want to talk about automations and with these I can now work on various automations in my network now the way this works is there are four quadrants on it here that's why they call it a wall mode quad and I labeled them one two three and four and I'm going to make it so that when I press button one it turns on the zigbee bulb and when I turn button two I'm going to press button two and it's going to control the other bulb the the Z-Wave smart plug so how would I go about doing that well I'm going to go into settings automations and scenes and I'm going to create an automation the trigger is going to be a device and I'm going to find my wall mode quad and I'm going to say when it creates the action on scene one key pressed and then I'm going to say control a device and let's pick which device I'm talking about here I said that was going to be the zigbee switch and here I'm just going to say toggle it save that and I'm going to call this button one all right now let's give it a try I click button number one and the light goes on click it again it goes off now I'm going to do the same thing I'm going to fast forward do the same thing for button number two now when I press button number two you can see it toggles the second light first light second line now let's go crazy and let's do button number three turns both of them on now for the next automation I'm going to use a scene and the scene is going to be a combination of both of those lights so let's go back to settings and I'm going to go into automations and scenes and in here I'm going to add a scene and I'm going to call this scene both lights and the devices that I'm going to put in here are my third reality switch that's the Z-Wave switch and my Smart Switch 6. and that's it okay save that and then I'm going to say I want this to be on and then I want this to be on okay so this is going to be both the lights on save that okay then I'm going to duplicate this and say both lights off and I'm going to save that so if I click both lights on they go on and both lights off they obviously are off okay now Let's do an automation here we're going to create a new one the trigger is going to be guess what my wall mode button three and a button three puts both of them on but it doesn't toggle them so here's what I'm going to say I'm going to then create another one for button four okay button four is going to activate the scene called both lights off and they're off on off or I can control them individually that's how you do scenes and automations now remember scenes can't be toggled because if these were light bulbs that had varying brightness I could set a scene for watching TV or watching a movie or cooking you can have a scene that has a bunch of bunch of different devices in it and you can set their settings whether it be color brightness anything like that and you can use anything to trigger those scenes this is a a button that I'm pressing but that could also be a motion sensor or something like that so that's how you do scenes and automations all right the next thing I want to talk about is add-ons now add-ons are one of the most powerful features of Home assistant in my opinion and they are basically they make it an extendable platform that other people can develop extensions things that you know it works in ways that it wasn't intended for and just greater capabilities and these things are just they're made to be plugged in to home assistant and so it's a really great platform for developers and whatnot that that want to you know do something special so anyway let's look at the add-ons so you get to the add-ons from the settings menu and here you can see the fifth one down is add-ons now the only add-on I have in there at this point is the Z-Wave JS add-on and if you recall that was installed automatically from when I when it detected my Z-Wave z-stick was inserted so I didn't have to do that but there is an add-on store you can see this button down here for the add-on store and there's a whole bunch of add-ons that are here out of the box that you can choose from now if you see a smaller list on your installation what you need to do is come over to your profile here and down here is advanced mode you have to make sure you have advanced mode on and that will unlock a whole bunch of additional add-ons that that you wouldn't see without that checked okay so let's go back to that and in addition to that there are add-ons like hundreds of them that are made by Third parties that are not even on this list and I'll show you one of those in a moment but there are some and I'm not going to go through all of these obviously but there are some that I use that I recommend and the first is this terminal and SSH now a little bit of that I'm just going to click install it's that simple um what this does is it enables you to get at a Unix terminal okay for Linux it's a Linux terminal so you can either get to the terminal directly through your home assistant um URL right through the web browser or you can SSH into it and it's not something that you will always need to do but it is a nice feature to have and all I'm going to do here is say I want to show it in the sidebar and click Start and now I've got this terminal over here and when I click on that you can see it shows you a home assistant command line and I can see you know what's my current directory I'm in the root directory and I can LS is to list the directory to show you all the contents of the directory so these are all the the things that are in there so I can change to config I can do an LS there you can see this is where all the yaml files are so this is if you ever need to dig a Little Deeper it does require some knowledge of Linux so it may not be for everybody but this is something that I use all the time I can't say all the time but it's something that I recommend all right now you can see that's one of the other add-ons that I put in there now what's some others um another one is a mosquito broker so that's an mqtt broker I'm not going to install it right now but if you ever come across some device that you want to communicate with to be a mqtt you can install the mosquito broker that one goes in really quickly as well duck DNS we're gonna do that one I am going to install duck DNS and I won't go detailed into the setup it's not that big of a deal you have to go on to their website and sign up and um I'm gonna check all of these actually and this is where I have to put in my domain so let me go get my domain and I'll be right back now I'm here on duckdns.org and it gives you a whole bunch of different ways to sign in I'm just going to sign in with Google so just understand that I created a domain here and it shows my current IP address and I'm just going to use this and this token that's here and I'm sorry that I have to blur all this out because it is specific to my installation so what I'm going to do is come over here and I just have to put in my domain okay I put my domain in there and then the token I need to get from here and I believe that's it all right it's set up now I've got my duck DNS add-on that is going to come into play later when we talk about remote access just put a pin in that because that's a an important one for us you've heard me talk about yaml yaml is the configuration language behind the scenes and these days you don't really have to touch yaml that often but it is good to have a knowledge of it that it exists and there's going to be times that you're going to potentially need to pay attention to it especially depending upon the other add-ons that you use so one of the things that I'm going to do is I'm looking for here it is Studio code server so this is Visual Studio is a free platform that Microsoft developed and it's obviously usable on Linux it's usable on a lot of different platforms so what this does is it it's basically an editor on steroids and it allows you to see yaml and open those files and do editing if necessary and and it also does some formatting for you and things like that that's the biggest that's the hardest part about yaml is the fact that it's very structured and the indentation has to be right and the colons and it's a whole syntax which is kind of a pain in the neck so they've been working for years trying to get it so that people like you and me don't need to worry about yaml but every now and then you might need to so now you can see I have Studio code server here on the side and when you open that up you can see here's all the config in the in the config folder I think I could set this to dark yeah dark Visual Studio good okay so I can set that to dark and now when we go to this is the configuration file that is config.yaml or configuration.yaml and then automations all the automations that I created before in this video are all in here and this is this is behind the scenes the way they are configured now in the old days of Home assistant you used to have to know how to code yaml but not anymore now everything is through the front end but just be aware that these things are here here's the scenes.yaml as well you can see those are the two scenes that I created earlier so anyway it's here and that's why I recommend Studio code server all right let's talk about backup now you remember when you're talking about a Raspberry Pi your Achilles heel here is the SD card these are not meant to be used as disk drives and but that's how the Raspberry Pi uses it So eventually that will fail okay there could be other reasons why your home assistant might fail and you might have to restore it so you want to back up your configuration all the time okay periodically and so whether you're using a Raspberry Pi or you're using a an x86 computer it doesn't make a difference even though this one has a real SSD drive in it which is very reliable it's still vulnerable to issues and there may come a time through whatever glitch that you need to restore your home assistant configuration so you want to back it up now there's two ways that I recommend backing up one of them is um if you have a computer that's running all the time in your house or an AS you can set up a Samba share and what that just means is that you you have a shared folder someplace on your network and you can have your home assistant back up to that Samba share the other is you can use a Google Drive and if you don't have a computer on in the house you can have a Google Drive and you can have it back up to the Google Drive now there may be others as well but I've seen videos on how to do the Google Drive and all um I'll put a link to one of them down in the the video description below if you want to use that route what I'm going to do and I'll show you how to do it is to set up a Samba share which because I have a Nas running in my house I can do that so let me come back over here okay I am logged into my Nas over here and you can see I created a shared folder that I call h a backup and that is for my home assistant backup and I also created an aha user and this is the only user account that has access to this shared folder and here is the shared folder it is empty and uh just waiting to be used so it's ready for me to set up the samba backup on home assistant now the samba backup or the Google Drive backup neither of those are built-in add-ons you need to find them you can do a search form I'll put a link to them both down in the video description below but here is the get page for this hash IO Samba backup okay and it's by this guy here Thomas More more and usually you can see whenever somebody is donating their time to basically build a plug-in not only to help themselves but then they put it out on git so that other people can use it like this usually there's some way to donate to them so you know they don't make any money off of it so just be kind if you're going to use it just give them a couple bucks and it just makes their day and I know personally when people donate to me anyway this tells you for the installation you're going to navigate to the add-on store and then you're going to add this URL okay so let's take this and we're going to come back over here to these three dots and I'm going to say repositories and I'm going to add this Repository okay and close that and now when I scroll down here and now you see Tom's add-on right here okay the samba backup so now I'm going to click on that and I'm going to install this now to edit the config IP address of my host which is my Nas and the share I called h a backup and the target directory just will be that and the username I called h a there's the password keep local all keep remote all I'm just going to say keep local how many backups do I want to keep local on the machine here I'm going to say uh let's just keep two local and the remote I'm going to say Keep 10 of them and here I can say what's the trigger time in other words what time of day is this going to run I'm going to say 3am and I'm going to run it all days of the week so every day of the week I'm going to keep 10 I'm actually going to make this bigger because they're not very big so I'm gonna I'm Gonna Keep let's say 20. now let's do an entire month we're going to do 30. I'm going to say save so unfortunately there is no button to manually do a backup and force it to go so that I could demonstrate it to you so I took a couple screenshots from the next day and here you can see that it successfully ran last night at 3am and here you can see the backup file on my share folder in the net all right next we're going to talk about remote access and to do that I'm going to set up the home assistant app on my phone let me share this screen for you okay now I'm in the App Store and I searched for home assistant and I already have it installed so I'm going to click open now when I'm on my local network you can see scanning for servers and it finds my home assistant installation I'm just going to click home I can put in my credentials here and I can log in and let's see I'm going to set up notifications okay now you can see I have my home assistant here in fact I can click on there you can see the light over here on that side of my face goes on just by clicking those things so that's great they both work so this is essentially the same dashboard that I'm seeing by default on the screen in fact you can see when I click that the little thing here shows up and the same thing on the screen they both are in sync which is great but this topic is remote access now what I'm going to do is I'm going to turn off my Wi-Fi and now oh I click this and nothing happens why is that well all right let's go back to see this says connected via internal URL so I'm gonna do this I'm going to add a server I'm going to enter the address manually I realize during editing that I could have entered the external URL right in this screen and I would have had two URLs the internal and the external for the same server it supports that so that's what I recommend but I'm going to proceed the way that I did it I'm going to put in the domain that I created with duck DNS now remember we talked about duck DNS earlier so that enables me to put in the domain name for my home's address I'm connected now this is off Wi-Fi this one I'm going to delete okay now here I am connected to the same server but I am off Wi-Fi you can see there's no Wi-fi indicator at the top of my phone I'm just on my cellular LTE signal so let's try this again and it works and it works in the same level of real time I am connected directly through my firewall speaking of firewall I did have to open up and do port forwarding on my firewall so that when I go to my firewall with Port 8123 it forwards to my home assistant instance that's beyond the scope of this video just understand that it is a step that is necessary for this to work so now I can use my home assistant app on my phone from anywhere in the world so that's remote access okay let's talk about dashboards so a lot of people think that dashboards are one of the most powerful features of Home assistant I think that's debatable because I think dashboards are only really applicable if you're sitting at your computer or some other device and looking at dashboards they're good I want to show you how to use them but don't overuse them in my opinion because that's not the point you should not be having to they give good demo but you shouldn't have to be sitting there to use your dashboard now what you're seeing here is the home dashboard that is by default with every home assistant and it is managed by home assistant if I go into one of my devices and I say add to dashboard it says you're not managing any dashboards so let me show you the three dots up here in the corner or where you can say I want to edit this dashboard because maybe you say you know this Walmart quad this means nothing to me what do I need these on here for so this I'm going to say edit that dashboard and it's going to say hey do you want to take control of your dashboards and if you do then it will no longer be automatically managed by home assistance so remember that by default it is automatically managed by home assistant you have to come in and take control and then when I do that you can see this is the home dashboard which I can click this little icon and rename it and change the icon if I want to whatever the case may be I can even delete this dashboard but I can also create additional ones so I'm going to create this one I'm just going to call it switches and let's see what icon should I use all right the light switch icon will work all right so there you go now I'm going to add a card to it now cards are these widgets that you can put on your dashboards and you can put them in various different ways so let's say I want to add my smart switches or my my smart plugs to my dashboard now I can do this by card if I want or I can do it by entity so I'm going to do it by entity because I'm going to come over here and I'm going to say where's my Smart Switch 6 but I want the switch one not the light one the light one doesn't work it is that's not what controls the plug itself and then the other thing I'm going to do is I'm going to take the third reality and I'm going to put that one on here too continue and I'm going to say okay great this is the card I'm going to add that to the dashboard and now I've got the control of both of these lights see I'll switch that now you can see boom boom nice so that is one card I can do another one that is I mean there's lots of them here but let's say I do a weather forecast I'm just going to show current weather and forecast great save that add that I can move these things around as needed I can edit these things if I want to okay I've customized the name here and I can do them just like before you don't have to keep the device name the way that home assistant created it so that's good I like that and then when I'm done I click done and now I've got the home is still here but I've also got switches now another thing I can do is like even on this home one where the Walmart quad I'm just gonna say edit this dashboard and I'm going to come in here and say delete that card I don't need to know there you go I don't need that all right so basically that's dashboards you can create as many dashboards as you want across the top you can if you notice each one of the dashboards has a URL associated with it so you can take any one of those like I could take this switches and I can create a kiosk somewhere in my house that displays this dashboard and that's beyond the scope of what I'm trying to do here I just wanted to give you an overview of the fact that you you can take control of dashboards you can put devices on them and configure them and format them however you want and yeah that's it now those of you that have watched my channel in the past know that I've had insteon devices in my house and about a year ago they went out of business but they came back so you're probably wondering hey we saw this insteon Hub here discovered aren't you going to set that up too well the answer is no after a lot of um you know contemplation I decided that I really want to get away from insteon insteon is a proprietary protocol whereas everything else in home automation is really going towards more Open Standards and although insteon is great and it it works definitely you can't compare on the price so for example I got a four pack of those zigbee smart plugs four pack for thirty dollars that's 750 each an equivalent in insteon is this on off module it's 55 dollars okay similarly one of the real reasons why I I loved insteon was these keypad dimmers okay and they're really pretty cool but they're eighty dollars a piece they allow me to not only control um a device like I have one of these in my kitchen and it can turn on and off the kitchen lights but those other seven buttons can be used to program other scenes or other devices so I have one for my Island lights I have one for my cabinet lights and and that makes it really useful to me but guess what there are options available this is something you can see I purchased this a year ago and I have yet to use it and part of it was because I wanted to set up my home assistant to see how I could use it but this is actually a Zoo's Z-Wave device that is a not only controlling a load that big switch controls the light but the other four buttons can be used for other things so and it's a lot cheaper it's half the price it's forty dollars so that's something that's on my to-do list is to act actually investigate how these things work and now that I have my home assistant set up I'm actually I've got a long list of products that I want to actually test with it and I'm moving myself away from insteon so I apologize to any of you that are still using and stay on not going to be able to help you out with that one I will say that I have played with the insteon integration and it is a lot better than it was a year ago a year ago I tried it and it was in my opinion it it wasn't going to do the job for me but the way it is today I think it's a lot better so if you are an insteon user hey I have great respect for that but um it's just I'm going in a different direction now there is one more feature that I intend to implement but I did not talk about it in this video because it is a broad topic it's going to need a video of its own and that is the Amazon Echo integration I use Amazon Echo in my house and there are instructions on how to do that and you can see right here on home assistant dot IO there is an integration with Amazon Alex a and um there is a long list of of what you can do here there's an easy way and there's a hard way the easy way as you can see here is to use home assistant Cloud home assistant cloud is also called nabukasa and it costs 65 a year now nabukasa is the company behind home assistance so they don't sell the software it doesn't cost anything it's free but in order to use this integration they do charge a monthly or an annual fee so for 65 a year you can go ahead and and use this like I said that is the easier approach the more difficult approach is listed further down on this page and there's a whole slew of steps that are required to get this set up with Amazon and it is something that I it's on my to-do list so leave a comment if that is something that you're interested in and uh but it is something that I intend to do down the road so other than that I do have some additional Integrations that I plan to put in I do have some Lutron caseta in the house and I have some 2E devices and things like that I'm gonna play with it but I've given you the foundation here in this video you now know how to do Integrations they all pretty much work the same way and um even add-ons they work pretty much the same way too all of them have their own specific little quirks all I would say is just read the directions because that's it's pretty straightforward when you do that and just uh feel free to play around and as long as you're backing up your home assistant you're not going to mess anything up you can always restore to yesterday's backup if you screw something up so hopefully that helps and you know please leave me a comment down below let me know how you found this video if it was useful to you and if you did actually Implement home assistant because of it and if you did find anything that is incorrect please let me know I am going to revise this video over time and uh because like I said home assistant continues to change so I will come out with new versions of this every now and then so thanks for watching and I will see you in the next one

Channel: HandyDadTV

Views: 17,453

Keywords: handy dad tv, handydad.tv, handydadtv, home assistant, home automation, smart home, zigbee, z wave, z-wave, home assistant for beginners, home assistant for dummies, getting started with home assistant, raspberry pi, duckdns, duck dns, sonoff, aeotec, geekom, intel nuc, how to install home assistant, balena etcher

Id: CYvTLw_Wn6I

Length: 60min 57sec (3657 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 08 2023