Complete Home Assistant Beginners Guide (2021)

hey everybody i'm zach from bluebot tech and today we're going to be going over how to install and set up home assistant so this all started for me about a couple months ago i was originally a wink user i started getting email messages from wink saying they're going to switch to a subscription model which i wasn't super happy about because i already wasn't super happy with their service it was always very laggy things wouldn't work api would be down for an entire day so i eventually got jason on board we started testing out home assistant and i don't think we've looked back so we're gonna try and show you some of the benefits over the course of the next couple videos but today we're going to focus on getting started so once we're set up and installed with home home assistant we're going to go over how to install the file editor which will allow us to edit configuration.yaml or other files on the home assistant this is generally how you set up most things or integrations after that we're going to set up samba share which will allow us in the event we can't get through to the web interface we're able to connect on a pc or mac or linux via some sort of share after that we're going to go over duck dns and let's encrypt now this will give us that remote access so i know one thing that was important for me is being able to access and control my devices from anywhere not just on my local network so that duck dns will give us our dynamic dns and let's encrypt will make sure we're connecting securely and not sending you know username and passwords over cleartext and then to go along with that we're going to show you how to prepare your router for using duckdns and set up port forwarding so let's get started [Music] okay everybody so welcome back to the bluebot tech channel today we're going to be going over how to install and set up a basic or first installation of home assistant we're going to cover how to install that on our raspberry pi so to start off we're going to go to homeassistant.io as i already have pulled up here we'll go to getting started and then we'll click here on device that is supported by this guide today i'm going to be using a raspberry pi 3 model b plus so it is 64-bit but we're going to use the 32-bit image as you can see it's required for the gpio support so just in case we want to go that way in the future we can so again we'll click here this will download that image i've already got the image here on my desktop as you can see but we'll walk through the steps as you know you're gonna have to anyway next we're going to want to plug in our adapter or if your computer has a card reader um whatever you're using to read your micro sd card so as you see this already has home assist install installed on it so we are going to need to format this disk so i'll show you how we're going to do that and close these for now so i'll be using sd card formatter it's definitely one of the easier methods on on windows now if you're using something like mac i personally like to use uh apple pi baker and of course we'll include links to all these things in the description below the video of course you do have your command line tools such as disk utility and then df in linux you can you can do all this there as well to make this easy we will select our card that we're formatting we'll give it a quick format yes so as you can see we're now formatting that drive okay we've got that drive nice and empty now okay so from at this point we're done formatting the card and we don't need sd card formatter anymore so we can go ahead and close that from here we need to write that image onto disk so here we have the image file to get this into a usable format as you can see it's uh gzipped so it's just a compression method so i'll use 7-zip to unzip that and we'll include the download for 7-zip as well just in case you don't have it so 7-zip will extract files here which puts it right here on my desktop i've already done this so we don't need to go there but as you can see it's no longer got that gzip extension so we're going to go to baleno etcher now this is a super simple software for writing these images to your sd card so this is a great tool for more than just home assistant so we'll flash from file we'll want to choose that hus os rpi 3 image open we'll double check just to make sure it grabbed the right disk of course it did that's the disk i'm using the 64 gigabyte microsd card continue and now we will flash it and now this will take uh several minutes so we'll be back in a couple minutes when this is done all right and we are back as you can see we finished flashing that uh that disk image is now being validated by etcher but we can get started on a few of the next steps so depending on how you're going to uh attach your raspberry pi to your network whether it be wired or wireless wired definitely uh you know the easier way to go plug a cable in you should be good to go otherwise we're going to need to set up our raspberry pi so it knows what network to join right off the bat so to do that we can scroll down here to option three as you see we can set up wi-fi or a static ip address so of course if you wanted to set a static ip for a wired connection this is a you would do a similar process here so we'll walk through the steps of setting up your raspberry pi to connect to whatever wireless network you decide so they do have a home assistant how-to here if we open that up real quick and show you so it opens their github page you can scroll down and you're most likely going to want the wireless lan wpa psk so you're simply going to take that and copy this into a text document so you can right click on the background here new text document i've already got one here so we've set this up already as you can see all we've done is change the ssid and the password so password goes here for your wi-fi and your ssid goes here sorry they are blanked out but you know put your info there you'll save that file close out of that and then from here you're going to want to remove that dot text extension on that file now if you don't see that dot txt extension what you can do is go to the control panel you go to appearance and personalization file explorer options and then once that pops up you'll go to view you'll scroll down here a little bit to hide extensions for known file types if you can't see it that will most likely be checked you want that unchecked and then you'll apply okay and then that should let you see that txt file extension so what we're going to do is we're going to just get rid of that now windows will probably give you a little warning that changing the extension might make it unusable yes you do want to do that okay and then once we have that all set up what we're going to want to do is we're going to want to go back to our micro sd card as you can see here so this is these are all the files that etra wrote onto our sd card so following the instructions in home assistant as you can see you're going to want to add this config folder at the top of the directory so new folder config all in caps you want to go in there you're going to make again a new folder this one's going to be called network all lower case and then within that network folder that's where you're going to drop your my network file okay so we can go back to the root of our drive make sure everything is all good and we should be able now to eject this sd card so we'll go ahead and eject our usb storage pull that out and now it's time to put our micro sd card into our raspberry pi okay once that micro sd card is in our raspberry pi power it on and let that start booting up and i will show you the splash page once that's loaded okay now that we've got our prepped sd card in our raspberry pi we should be able to go to this url so we're going to go to homeassistant.local on port 8123 now it does start up fairly quick so we'll give it a minute we should see it start to come up okay as you can see now we get the splash screen of preparing home assistant this can take some time so you know now would be a good time to go grab a beer grab a coffee so we'll wait for this and we'll be right back okay welcome back so as you can see our home assistant server is finished setting up we need to give it a little bit of information so we're going to give it a name we're going to just call this bluebot tech keep the same username we'll give password and we'll create our account now once this account is created we can create several different user accounts uh once we have home assistance set up so you can set your home location and home assistance this beneficial because what you can do is it'll choose a weather location or you know your sun up sundown location and you can do some automations based on your actual location so we don't need to do this right now since this is just a quick setup but if if this is your personal home assistant server obviously this may be a good idea if you want those features so just click next now as you can see home assistant has already started to find some things on the network as you can see it's found a canon mg 6600 series printer and if we click more it may show more i like to kind of set this stuff up after i'm done installing the add-ons i want in home assistant so we'll just click finish for now okay so the first place it takes us is the lovelace dashboard as you can see we have our navigation bar over here on the left side so far it leaves us with a weather most likely based on that location that i gave it's in celsius but being in america i would probably default to fahrenheit and then up here we have a couple little widgets showing you know updater is on and the raspberry pi power status and our location for the blue bot tech user is unknown it's also going to ask if you want to stay logged in what this is going to do is kind of set a token for you so that you're not constantly having to log in if you end up using one of the mobile apps and you want to kind of log out an old session you can go into your user down here and you'll find those sessions down here at the bottom so our refresh tokens it'll set one of those we can also create some long-lived access tokens for other things as you can see they can be valid for 10 years so you're going to want to use those for things you really need to have that long access so we'll stay logged in our notifications as you can see it's discovering devices on the network but we're like i said we're going to come back to that so what we're going to get started with uh setting up our server is we'll head to our supervisor we'll go to our add-on store and one of the first things we're going to want to add is our file editor so we'll go ahead and add that install so there's not a whole lot of setting up with the file editor as you can see we'll let this install you can read over the documentation but it's fairly easy to use should just be about be installed okay and as you can see it is now installed we're gonna keep it to start on boot and if you want i like to do this just because the file editor is pretty common to use we'll go ahead and set that to show in sidebar and we'll go ahead and start this add-on alright our add-on has now started one thing or the main thing that we're going to be editing with the file editor we'll go in here just to show you real quick is the configuration.yaml so as you can see there's not much here now but as we grow our home assistant installation so will our configuration.yamo will have things like zigbee z-wave http alexa etc so you know this grows a lot and very quickly so you're going to kind of get comfortable with dealing with your configuration.yaml all right we'll go back to our supervisor add-on store a few other things we're definitely going to want to add is our samba share so we'll go ahead and install that and the nice thing about samba is should your home assistant server just for some reason the web browser portion stop working we can access it via some sort of network share so whether it's windows or mac you can always connect to it and then you can move files in and out and say you completely screwed up your configuration.yaml what you can do is mount that share go in edit the configuration.yaml and then reapply it and hopefully you can recover your server however we'll get into backups later and how you recover from you know potentially a catastrophic failure so there is some configuration necessary for this so our username we'll leave it at home assistant for now we'll set our password to bluebot tech just in case we need to access it everything else you can leave fairly standard and we can save info and we can go ahead and start that and of course start on boot as well so we can go back now you see we have two things running well this is not running yet as you can see it's grayed out we'll get to that so it'll probably require some sort of reboot the next thing we're going to add we'll get the duct dns started so we'll click install there now this is going to be a fairly longer setup not hard but we're going to have to go to duck dns set our sub domain and you know kind of set up some let's encrypt stuff the great thing about duck dns is it makes it super easy to access your home assistant from outside your network and with let's encrypt it lets you do so securely so we can look over the documentation real quick but you know the main goal of you watching this video is to watch us set it up so we'll go ahead and set our let's encrypt terms to true now we'll leave our full chain dot pem and priv key.pam these are defaults and they work the way they are so we do need our duck dns token so we're going to go to duckdns.org i'm going to sign in with github and then as you can see i've already set this up but essentially what you're looking for here is this duck dns token and then you also need to set up some sort of sub domain so what you'll do essentially is click here type in whatever subdomain you want you'll click add domain if it's successful and not an already registered subdomain then you'll get a success message and it'll grab your current ip so what we want to do from here is grab our token so we'll copy that we'll come here to our token paste it looks like we have a leading space okay there we go and then we'll want to change our domain so we were bluebot tech dot dot dns.org okay now we'll save that and we're going to want to check start here and then okay now that it's started we're going to come here to our log so everything's starting up we're going to want to refresh this occasionally as you can see it's now generating our account key and every time we refresh as it's setting things up with let's encrypt we should be getting a little further along what we're looking for is everything to build and check out successfully and in the end it's gonna say done so as you can see we're making some progress creating new directories again we're looking for that done and after this is set up we may need to do a restart of the server that'll help kind of everything along especially with duct dns up looks like our samba share is now good to go so while we're waiting on duck dns let's add on a few more items mosquito broker this will be great for you know all your kind of mqtt type applications so we'll install this we'll get to this in other videos especially with mqtt and node-red and how to set up automations and controlling things really over wi-fi so as you can see this is you know a little bit more configuration i'm not going to configure this right now just for saving time but we'll have further videos on configuring mosquito broker and node-red and all the fancy things you can do with that let's go back now and check on our duck dns so it does look like everything is started let's check yep it says done now so we can go here and test real quick https blue but tech dot dot dns dot org okay not working so what we know we need to do is do some port forwarding now to port forward you're gonna have to log into your router um you know everyone's router may not look the same unfortunately you know there's there's a crazy amount of variables that we we can't possibly cover i am using a more advanced network setup with the ubiquity unify stuff but you know you may be using cisco or linksys or netgear whatever you're generally looking for the same thing you're going to want to get into your settings and you're going to try and find something involving port forwarding now we've already set this up but as you can see home assistant so we'll go in here and edit just to show you and talk about what we're going over so i've named this rule home assistant i've enabled the rule interface is on my wan interface so that's coming from the internet so what this is saying is anything coming from the internet specifically on any ip port 443 so that's kind of signifying that we're going to be using that let's encrypt ssl tls encrypted tunnel we're going to anything that hits the wan interface from 443 we're going to go ahead and forward that to 192.168.107.15 which is where my home assistant server is located on my network and we're going to forward that to instead of port 443 we're going to forward it from 443 to 8123 and we're going to allow both tcp and udp because i haven't really looked into is home assistant using tcp or udp for everything so it's safer to go with both for now okay so that is all set up now what we're looking for is the ability to login so from here we're going to want to go to our file editor and we'll go into our configuration.yaml we'll give it some space here we'll throw in a comment this is our http section where we're looking for here is http and then our base url is bluebot tech.duckdns.org our ssl certificate is sitting at our ssl directory full chain dot pem and then our ssl key is at ssl priv key dot pen so as you can remember those kind of were default values that we had in that duck dns configuration so we're going to save this everything seemed to save successfully so we are going to want to do a quick reboot and once the reboot is over we'll be right back so just to do that supervisor we go to our system and we can give this a quick reboot and we'll be right back all right welcome back everybody so the server looks like it's just about back so what we'll do is go to https bluebot tech.duckdns.org all right and now as you can see it's giving us the opportunity to log in from an https encrypted site everything looks good we get a connection is secure we go ahead and log in all right and there we go as you can see we're in our home assistant server connected under https so we are secure if we go to the supervisor as you can see duck dns file editor mosquito and samba are all looking good and we are logging in from technically somewhere kind of new since we are coming from https now instead of http so we can go ahead and say yes to that and all right thanks for watching this video everybody we're gonna have some great stuff coming up in the future with regards to home assistant so look forward to that we're gonna have things like how to set up zigbee and how to set up z-wave node-red all the above thanks for [Music] watching

Channel: Blue Bot Tech

Views: 16,461

Keywords: Home Assistant, HASSIO, Home Assistant guide, home Assistant tutorial, install home Assistant, how to home Assistant, home automation, smart home, raspberry pi, duck dns, let's encrypt, home Assistant setup, duck dns setup, duck dns guide, home Assistant for beginners, home Assistant walkthrough, home Assistant made easy, home assistant automation, home assistant raspberry pi, home automation ideas 2020, HASSIO setup, home assistant 2021, automation, Samba Share, addons

Id: 0P5MXIcfhSc

Length: 24min 14sec (1454 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 23 2020