Home Assistant Basics - all you need to get started with a new smart home

i've got my house wrapped around my little finger with home assistant and i want to tell you how you can get yours the same so in this video i'm going to show you everything you need to know to get started with home assistant we're going to set it up on a raspberry pi from scratch we're going to add some devices we're going to set up some automations we're going to link it with a phone we're going to link it with google google assistant alexa whatever and i'm going to take you along for the ride so stay there watch the video and i hope you enjoy it [Music] so [Music] so first off what is home assistant have you ever heard of it it's an open source platform that allows you to bring together all the devices in your house into one platform there are things like homekit and alexa and google and all those things but they all have limitations they're all proprietary and there's always a list of supported hardware which means you can't always bring in everything with home assistant the list of supported devices is huge and because it's open source new ones are being added all the time by people and worst case if you don't have one if it doesn't support what you've got you could always write your own using python you'll just have to learn python which may or may not be so simple now i want to start from the very beginning here with you so i'm going to start from scratch the best place to run home assistant is in your house you can get unlike these cloud services which rely on an internet connection home assistant is designed to be local to your devices so what i want to do to begin with is we're going to take one of these this is a raspberry pi and if you've never heard one of these it's basically just a one of these this is a very small computer really it's got all the bits you would need from a computer in this small package and what we're going to do is get home assistant running on this but before we do that let's get this in a case because it's not very safe without one so this is basically something i bought from the pie hut it's a whole bundle it's got a power supply here so we've got a usbc power supply we've got the pi itself which is a raspberry pi 4 with 4 gig of ram he's got this case and a small micro sd card so let's go ahead and get this in here so we just line this up here with the ports facing that way and there are little little stands standoffs in there to put that on and then the us the uh sort of the sd card will slide in there just put that case lid back on and that's that we're not going to need that power supply so i'm just going to pop that out the way down there so the first thing we need to do is actually get um home assistant installed onto this sd card now we're going to need a micro sd adapter now i've got an sd card slot in my laptop but i don't have the sd card adapter to hand so you stay there for one moment while i go and get it okay so here we go here's the um sd card adapter what we'll do is we'll take out the sd card and get out the and we'll insert the whole adapter into the computer then we'll put all these bits out the way on the floor once that's in there we're going to use a tool called raspberry pi imager now you can download this from the raspberry pi website but i've already got it installed here so i'll run that up here and then we can just use this wizard it's really good this tool it's just got everything you need so press choose os and then we're going to scroll down to other general purpose os and then nope sorry my mistake we're going to go down a bit further to other specific purpose os then we're going to choose home assistance and home automation then home assistant and then we choose the one for our pi in our case we need this rpi4 400 version so we'll click that there next we'll choose the storage we want to put it on which in our case is the apple sd card reader and then we're just going to press right here yes type in our password and it's starting to write that to the sd card so that might take a few minutes and we'll just speed this along while that happens [Music] so while that's writing i can tell you a little bit what we're going to do next we're going to take the sd card out of here and put it into our raspberry pi we're going to power it up and plug in a network cable where they're going to wait a little bit for it to just turn itself on and sort itself out and then we'll be able to start configuring home assistant that won't take probably that long so we'll get back to you when this sd card has finished it's just verifying 20 so it's finished writing it's verified we can now press ignore and continue and remove this from the laptop so let's get this added to our sd card let's remove the little micro sd bit and pop that into the slot here on the bottom okay so all we need to do now is put a bit of power into this and connect it to the network i really would recommend you do plug this in it's got wi-fi um i wouldn't use it because you do want this to have a reliable connection to the internet and also a reliable connection to all the other smart devices in your house because this is going to sit at the heart of everything so first things first let's plug in the network and we'll also plug in some power so i've got the usbc adapter here so we'll plug this in here so the light has come all on the front there and we're just going to leave that there for a minute to saw itself out once that's fully connected it will announce itself essentially to your network as homeassistant.local which means you can then open it up in a web browser by going to http colon homeassistant.localcolon8123 that's the default address for this unit and for most cases that'll be fine um in my case i've got a couple of these running uh from my in my house and for this demo so i won't be able to use that domain but i can connect directly to its ip address if you find on your network that it doesn't show up you can just go into your router and find out what ip address has been allocated to it if we try and go to it right now i know what ip address is going to get so i'll just go to that and we'll just see what's going on it's still not quite ready yet so we'll come back to that in a [Music] second we're just waiting for that initial boot up to happen because once that's finished we're going to get a page that's telling us that home assistant is uh preparing and then it'll do all its final setup and get itself online that can take a little while to happen as well so do be patient if it doesn't appear straight away just wait a little bit longer um although it can be quite daunting you've set this thing up you think it's organic it does usually work i've never had it not work so do trust the process and just be patient unlike i'm being right now come on connection refused give me access give me access to my shared assistant please i want to use it there we go so there we go it's preparing uh home assistant now this can take up to 20 minutes it's telling us we will just sit here and wait i won't make you sit here [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] right it's finished installing now so we can go ahead and create our first user account let's just do this here then i'll type in my type in my name and choose a password password i haven't entered it yet um password press create account the next step is to type in the name of your home we'll just use home we'll set our time zone europe slash london and the rest of that we'll just leave as that we'll turn on the analytics that's quite useful for the developers to be able to see what's going on and um gather information about this the platform so they know what to work on and then it's going to go and scan our network as it's done here and it's found various devices on my network we're not going to actually set up any of those immediately i'm going to just go and skip past that for now and this will take us to the dashboard so this is the home assistant main dashboard at the moment this dashboard is being entirely managed by home assistant which means it's just showing everything everything is going to get thrown onto that one page which is fine for now but we don't want that all the time we're going to go and write some custom dashboards in a moment to try and improve these things so i guess the first thing we want to do is bring in a device something this can manage so if we go to settings and we go devices and services we can see these ones here that have been discovered so this has found things on my network right now um specifically there's three phillips hues here for example so i've got three bridges um and then there's some other lights here like an on-air light which is just um outside my room here and then um an gato on air light and i like key light sorry um so if you see the device you want just click into there i'll just go and add this let's add the on air light quickly submit and we'll just add this one to show you how easy that is especially with these ones that don't have a lot of authentication and are local you just press a button so we'll choose where that is and we'll just choose that as in the living room if we go to overview now we've got that there and we can turn that on and off you can't see it but it's happening and that's just one of these that's just a tp-link plug i do recommend these actually this is the um the tp-link 115. you can turn this on and off then remotely but also this one's got energy monitoring built in which means you can see how much power it's currently using also and then also you can view the total consumption the day or forever or whatever you want which gives you an idea of how much energy your devices are using so i think we need to add a few more devices don't we um what i'm going to do is i'm going to go and add a couple of devices i'm not going to make you sit in and watch um because it'll be rather dull but i'll add well as i can what i'm going to do is i'm going to add one of these hue bridges i'm not sure which one it is so i'm going to choose this one in the middle and i'm going to press i'm going to press the button um i'll go down here and press the button on that bridge so i've pressed the button on the bridge and we'll just press submit here and now it's added added in my hue which has added a lot of extra devices to this install so we'll just press finish here and go and have a look at the device list quite a lot of devices because that's because i've added the bridge for you it's added all the sub devices from that bridge as well so every bulb every every switch every motion sensor they're all now in here if we go back to that dashboard as you can see we've got quite a lot here but we also have this here so we've got gradient light strip and that's now gone off so we've got a couple of things we can we can play with the lamp has now gone off as well so we've got some things here we can play with which is um what we wanted and i think we'll just add a couple more things while we're here so let's go here and what we'll do is we will add another integration and i'm going to search for shelly now shelley is a great little product they're really cheap they're tiny i've got one to hand but they're tiny little things and you can just put them behind light switches or behind um face plates in your house and then you can use them to um become smart relays which can then work with this you can turn things on and off i've got one for example i've got one on our utility room fan which means i can have that automatically come on when the humidity reaches a certain point or the tumble dry comes on so that's really handy but they've also got this thing called shelley e m i'm just going to add one of those so i'm just going to add that i'm just gonna type in its ip address and then we've got energy monitor a finish and i'm also while i'm there i'll just quickly add energy monitor b2 while i'm here which is on this ip and these are now going to let us see how much power is currently being used if we go over here we can see at the sensor on our dashboard we've got cooker energy grid heat pump and solar so here we can see right now if we look at solar power we're currently generating one kilowatt of solar energy um and or exporting 200 watts back to the grid and we're going to use that in a minute onto the dashboards but i just wanted to get that added in while i was here i think the first thing we should have a quick look at though is how automations work and how we can make things like pressing buttons on this switch do something in our environment so what we'll do is we'll go into settings and go to automations and scenes and we haven't got any right now which is fine so we'll press create and we'll start with an empty one and we'll name it toggle light on switch press just give it a quick description of what it is and every um automation has starts with a trigger so that's what's going to start it it might be a time of day it might be someone coming home it might be a button being pressed it could be lots of things so we're going to go here we're going to just choose this this switch here and we're going to say on the certain trigger on the first button pressed initially so when this button is first pressed we want that to happen we're not going to specify any additional conditions and we're going to choose the desk lamp and we're going to select toggle desk lamp and we'll press save that's straight in there and as soon as i press this button now this light has gone off and if i press it again the lights come back on again so that was really easy but that's nothing complicated you could do that in the hue app nothing is you know gonna you know blow your mind there but what if you wanted this button press to do something that wasn't you and you couldn't do in the hue app you could now do that because this automation is just being triggered and it can do anything it could send a message to your phone um it could open a garage door it could the choices are endless really it could arm your system it could enable certain modes lots of options there and that sort of gives you an idea of how the automation system works you have triggers you have conditions and then you have actions and you can do multiple actions per um per automation so let's change this so it solves both of those lights so instead of just controlling one device i'm going to delete that action from here and i'm going to press add action and i'm going to this time i'm going to use call service and the service i'm going to use is called light.toggle and what that allows us to do is just specify multiple lights that should be toggled so we'll do desk lamp and we'll add also gradient light strip and we'll save now they're both currently on if we press this button here like this both lights have gone off we do that again both lights have come on so that's brilliant pretty simple though if you get yourself with lighting though scenes are the thing to start with so let's start by having a look at a scene let's go to the scene section and it's imported all of the scenes here from um my philips hue because i've got some scenes set up in there because it's quite nice to design them in the hue app itself but let's create a new scene in here and we're going to call this all this just demo scene and what i wanted to do is i just wanted to make these lights um really bright so let's go to here and we're going to choose to have the desk lamp in this scene and we're also going to add the gradient light strip into this scene so let's click onto desk lamp and we're going to say right one brightness 100 really bright um like that and then on the gradient light strip we want that to be really bright too and we'll change the color of that to being a sort of orangey color like that so we can really see it when it's active so we'll save that scene now so that's now got an encapsulated idea of that that lighting design and if you've got that in another room you might have that on the ceiling lights on a certain point there's a lamp on or whatever it might be and we've configured that all in home assistant now so we could trigger that now so let's say when on the second button let's let's trigger that automation that scene on this bottom frame quickly um so you enable a demo scene on human so we'll do trigger again we're going to select this switch and we're going to go fourth bun pressed initially this time and then we're going to do activate scene and then we'll choose demo scene so press save there now and off it goes it's now activated that scene and if we want to request this now it'll turn it off and then we can toggle it back on again using the scene activator up next i want to look at how we can make all of this work with our voice assistants in the house so we can have those scenes activated by us asking um something like google or alexa to do that now to integrate with these in the most simple way possible we need to use the home assistant cloud service now this is a service provided by a company called naboo casa which are the people that sort of run the open source home assistant project so everything you do when you buy this service is also going back to the same people that do that and also supports the development of home assistance so it's it's a good value for money seeing as you haven't had to pay for home assistant other than the hardware so you can go into settings and then choose home assistant cloud and then you can sign up for a free one month trial you should do that and then once you've got that trial set up you'll be logged in and once you're connected you'll have a few options in here one of them is remote control text to speech alexa and google assistant we're going to look firstly at google assistant and what i have right here is a google home mini which is just basically um one of the things that works with google so i'm going to get this just plugged in quickly get some power into this thing make sure that's on and we'll just wait for that to boot up or we'll let that boot up while we talk about this so the way it works is in both alexa and google you can expose devices to those platforms so you could expose a light or you could expose a switch or a an automation or a scene and usually the default behavior in home assistant is to export everything and you don't really want to do that in my opinion so if you go into here and you go to something like manage entities you'll see 67 exposed entities now i always hello google so if you turn all these off then you're not going to be exporting too much and that then allows you to individually choose which things you want to export now in our case here i've exported a demo scene and the lamp i'm also going to export that um that demo night scene that we just created as well so we can use that um for uh showing how this works so we just take that and expose that entity once that's set up and that's all been synchronized over to google we need to actually get it onto here now let's do that now so we need to do that we need to use the google home app so get that installed if you haven't already you probably have if you've got one of these and we just go to the plus the add button and we do set up device works with google and then we just need to search for um home assistant cloud on here so we'll just do that home assistant cloud and when that comes up it'll ask us to log in so it'll ask you if you're using password and then you can press allow access that'll then link that up between the two systems if you wait a few seconds the spinner will go away and we'll see what we've got as you can see we've now got our lamp showing up within google's home so when we press it in here now on our phone it's actually turning up our light so we've got yet another interface hey google turn on the lamp and the lamps now come back on so we immediately just took two seconds really to set that up uh worth every penny for the cloud system we can also use this to trigger our automation so hey google activate demo night scene got it activating demo night scene so what scenes we acted hey google activate demo scene okay activating demo scene so they've all been made available pretty much straight away no problems that well what if we don't want to say um activate and then the name is saying what if we want to just say something else well with both alexa and google you can configure custom routines within their apps so if you just go to routines and we'll press add and then we'll choose add starter so we're going to choose when i say this um for example with when we say the building is on fire i'm going to choose an action and in this case i want to just trigger the demo night scene scene and then i'm also going to just have it oops not do that i want it to say something so it's just going to say oh i'll call the fire brigade get out the house okay and we'll save that and we'll press done and we'll press save and then we've got a custom routine so when we say hey google the building's on fire i'll call the fire brigade get out the house so that's another way you can set those custom names you don't want to have to set your scenes up called uh your scenes as the names you don't want to say activate sometimes and the same works for alexa you can use the alexa app to create which is a slightly different process but it's all done within the app on your phone so you can set all those up and those scenes can be exported you can also use it to export scripts we'll look at scripts in a moment but scripts are basically just sets of those actions so at the bottom of those automations you saw we were just calling those those actions um but you can just bolt those together into a script that just gets called whenever is necessary either from another automation or when you press a button or whatever so that's two of the things that you get from home assistant the other thing you get is this thing called home remote control which we'll talk about quickly now before we look at the mobile applications now remote control exposes your home assistant install in your house to the rest of the internet now normally this is pretty much safe behind your home firewall but that's not much good if you want to access your home from anywhere else for example if you happen to be out and about and you want to check in on your um your house and turn the light on or do something you won't be able to do that so you need to be able to access it from wherever you are and home assistant cloud provides this tunnel so we're going to turn that on and you'll see here we get given a url so it's a long random string dot ui.naboo.casa and once that's um enabled and set up when we access that url we can always use that wherever we are now a couple of things if you turn this on you must make sure you've got a secure password for all the users on your system your your home assistant install is available to everyone in the world the long url that is given there is a little bit deceiving in so much as it might make you think oh you need to be able to know that to find it but that's not actually true most of those probably show up in certificate transparency logs and things like that so it's important to remember your username and your password it's also important that you update the software frequently you don't want to leave your home assistant uh running really old versions of everything so you should keep on top of that it's really good though the system will pop up with a notification to tell you the new versions and when they come out so just make sure you apply those updates when they happen so now we've got that enabled we know that when we're out about we'll be able to talk back to this so let's have a look at the home assistant mobile app shall we and see what extra things we get by turning that on so download that from the app store or um or play store depending on whether you're using ios or android i've got an iphone here so we'll use that for this this example so when you press login um it'll scan for servers on your network and then you can just log in using your username and password and then once you've logged in you'll have your dashboard just on the screen straight away so here you can just see straight away we can um we can use this to now control our light as if we were using our computer so that's one of the top three benefits really is you can do all of that from your hand and whatever you are the second thing you can do once you've got the app installed you send notifications to your phone from automations or from the um from home assistant so if you leave a door opening not at home you can have that notification come straight through to your phone and that's a really useful piece of the automation puzzle so i'll just show you how to do that if you go to developer tools and then choose services you should be able to find this option here now if you just search you're just searching this for notify and then it'll show up for 10 notification via mobile app and then you can just press call service and that will then send the notification to your phone as you can see it's shown up here says fancy title hello world um and you can do more advanced things as well you can make that come through as a critical alert which i'll show you how to set up in a second so yeah you've got the notifications and they'll come through even they'll go through the most the same apple or google notification services you currently have so you don't necessarily on those ones need to worry about the remote access component so the third main benefit of having the phone is the ability to have home assistant know where your phone is and that's really useful because then you can do things like when i'm at home or when i'm not at home and have those used in your automations you can create zones to say um a geographic area with a certain radius that means when you enter that zone or when you leave that zone with your phone it can trigger things in there they don't have to just be your house you could have them at work you could have them at the shops you could have i don't know at the park wherever it might be so you can do certain things so you could say when i leave the park i want x to happen at home and you can do all that in here so if you go to settings areas and zones and then click on zones you can then configure as many zones as you want in here you can just drag the zone wherever you want it and then choose a radius not too tricky so that's zones but the other information you're getting sent is a bunch of sensors information right if you go to um settings and you go to devices and you look for a device called iphone or the name of your phone you'll see you're getting some data in here like your battery level um your location all of those sort of things they'll be showing up in here too which is really handy so you can see those things as well so just act as another device within your smart home if you've got others in the house install the app on their phones or ask them to install it because remember this is going to track them so it's important that they know that this is happening and you can see this and they understand how this home system works so do make sure they know that so let's do something just to bring some of that that together i think what we'll do is we'll create an automation that is triggered when the light comes on now this is a bit tenuous um because it would be better to have a door sense or something like that but we'll use the light so when the light comes on i want it to send a notification to my phone to say um x has happened or this is this has happened that's not good so what we'll do let's go to settings go to automations create automation and we'll start a new one so notify when light is switched on and we'll say so the trigger is going to be the device and we're going to do desk lamp and we're going to be when it's turned off so i know it's not going to send on and then we're going to set an action and here we're going to use the call service action and we're going to choose notify my iphone i'm going to say the door has been opened and what we're going to do is we're going to specify here we're going to do push sound critical 1 and we'll set a title security alert um this means so i'm going to press this button here because you can feel it we know turns off the lights so now when i turn that light back on i'm expecting a notification to come through on my phone so let's do that there it is the door has been opened and it's got this critical alert so we're getting that push through over on over our focus and things like that on our phone so that's quite useful as well especially if you're doing those security type type situations so we've got all that working so that's really handy so that's about um all we need to look at there's a lot of other things in the app you could look at so if you go into settings and then choose companion app there's a few things in here you can look at like you can choose more settings on the location and how that works you can also look at things like which um which actions are in here and then you can expose some of those things um within ios itself um you've got sensors on here which you can then choose to turn on and off which ones actually get pushed out and how often you want them sent to a home assistant and as well as other some integrations with apple watch and things like that so yeah that's the mobile app it's worth having a good play around that like everything in here just have a click around and see what you can find so that's the mobile app um i think that's pretty nice the next thing i think we could look at is probably just trying to tidy up this dashboard a little bit this is a bit of a a bit of a mess of data here and i think we can probably do better than this so let's go ahead now and show how this works let's start by pressing edit dashboard and it says first of all do you want to take control of your dashboard yes i do start with an empty dashboard take control and what we immediately get is this blank screen and an option that says add cart so let's go and add a card when you click add card you've got lots of little choices and each of these represents one of those white boxes that you can see on the page and we're going to start by keeping it really simple we're just going to add an entity card and this is one of the most basic types of things and this just shows some information so in this case by default we're just showing this on air light so watching we'll change this to desk lamp and it just shows us the stage that does it so i'm just going to save that and press done there's our dashboard it just says desk lamp on great um we click on that and when we can adjust the settings on the screen so that's one thing to do if we go now and edit this again let's have another look at other things we can do so let's delete that card because that's a bit boring so if we want to just do a list of entities we've got the entities list card and it's just showing i'm just i'm just going to show this here right now so this just shows us how many entities we want with appropriate actions next to them so what would be useful for us while we're doing this let's do the desk lamp and the gradient light strip and put them in into a box we have a title called a study lights just like this and then we'll save that onto the page so now when we toggle that off it'll just toggle off all the ones in that group and then turn it back on again they come back on again now i've just been told that a door has been opened because i set that up earlier so i think what i'll just quickly do is turn that off so we'll just disable for now notify when light is switched on we'll just toggle it off for now so next i think we can add another piece of information to this um this puzzle and what we could look at is seeing what we can do with um some information that we're getting sent so how much power that we're currently using or um let's do that so let's add a card and this i'm going to scroll down to gauge gauge is quite a nice card and we'll take that and we'll see if we can find grid power and this shows the amount of power so what's at the minimum is probably oh in this case maybe minus 6000 and the maximum is probably 12 000. um and we're not gonna divide severity it doesn't really it doesn't seem to cope with negative numbers there so we won't worry about that but there's our grid power and what that is showing is how much power we are currently using at home but again we're just building a long list and this isn't particularly nice so let's have a look at some of the components here we've got for making things look nice firstly we've got these things down here now this horizontal stack and vertical stack and grid these are the three i want you to to understand because they make things so much easier when you're building it let me quickly show you a bit about mine so this is my dashboard this is my main screen when i first open my app i have on one side i've got a list of rooms and on the other side i've got some information about what's going on so in this case i've got all the rooms here and then if i click into kitchen i've got the lights in the kitchen i've got the climate and the thermostat and then i've got a bit of information over here about um power being used in the kitchen so i can see right now the cooker is on so 3674.2 watts and we haven't used it much today and then we can click back and then go into a different room like the study and the same sort of thing applies there and let's look at one of these um these pages so let's take outside for example and what you can see here is we've got lots of these boxes and these are all just cards that have been laid out by me so let's go back to ours and let's have a look at grid because grid is a good one so we can choose on grid and we're going to just put in some entities for this we're just going to choose some entities um we're going to put in um some entities that can show not an entity list we just want some entities so we'll select entity and we'll set entity again we're going to put three of them in and we're going to choose the devices so we're going to take in um we're taking the temperature which is coming off this motion sensor we will have the state of our desk lamp and we will also bring in the grid power so there we go we've got three boxes next to each other but as you can see on the left hand side we've just got one big one so using this grid means we can put stuff um together to create one component so you can choose turning off rendering as a square on our as well here and if you add a fourth or you change this to be two columns you'll obviously influence how that looks something that the default dashboard in homelessness does it's uh things called masonry and it will automatically move stuff around so if you want consistency here my general approach to this is to then try and render only two cards on every page so on every page i have two cards which are usually vertical stacks so you've got vertical stack on the left and a vertical stack on the right on a small screen the right will go underneath the left and then within that you've got um as many extra cards as you want so if you look back at mine here i've got um i've got two columns and they're both just laid out like that and the same applies as you click through here everything is done um like this for consistency so we can make sure that things are there's some consistency on where to expect something on the screen to be regardless of the size of the screen so let's go ahead now and delete these cards and delete this here and delete this here and create that style so we're going to build in a vertical stack and this is just cards that go on top of each other um and the first thing we're going to do is just quickly recreate that entity list for our two lights so we've got desk lamp and we've got a gradient light strip and we're going to just call this one lighting and we're going to save that and then we can see that here you can go into these now as well if you want so if you don't want to call it the full name you could just call it desk lamp and then you could give it a um an appropriate icon and then you can also um customize other things on here as well if you want to show some additional image like when it was last updated you could do that too um so we'll just do this led strip and then we've got our little icons showing up there these use the material design icon so if you want to go and look to all of that you can find that just google it and there's a good site that gives you browse that so um let's put in another vertical stack at the root of our at the root of our page and in this one we're going to start by just um we're going to add in another entities thing and this time we're just going to show off the temperature and we'll show off whether there's any um the light level in the room too now these are going next to each other at the moment because um they are there's just not enough data to worry about um showing them next to each other at the moment but if we add some more let's go into this top one and we'll edit that and we'll add a new card and in this one i'm just going to add a simple gauge here that shows grid power and we'll save that and then we've got our two columns you can also put grids within vertical stacks and vertical stacks within grids and whatever you want however nested and you want you can go and do that so there's loads of things you can play with here and if you need to if you go into raw configuration editor you'll find all of this configuration is available in a yaml file so if you want to change things move things around you can do it from there as well and that can be a bit quicker if you've got certain things you want to do but using the visual editor is quite a good way to start um and you'll find there's loads of different things and cards on here you've got button cards here you can insert statistics and maps so you can bring in different things like that which would be useful if you've got things like heating controls in your house you could then use the climate or the thermostat element to bring that in there are also graphs and things like that as well that you can use so the um the options are basically um limitless well they're not quite limitless with this because there's a fair amount of constraint imposed by the by the the dashboard system because of just what it is but there are also some third-party things that you can use to bring in with this as well if you want to but you don't have to um you can do a lot with this if you want to style it differently there are themes you can both import but you can also write your own i'm not going to go into the full details on theming right now in this video but you can just do themes like um if you look at mine here i've just created this theme basically myself there's just some yaml files which have a bunch of hex codes in and spacing things like that spacing details so it's pretty good um the other thing that would be um me worth showing you about the dashboard system is the energy dashboard so if you go to i'll show you online because it's all set up if you go under energy you can get this view here and this view shows you the current um and or more historical for the day consumption within your house so you can see how much power you might generate for your solar panels how much you've brought in from the grid how much you've sent back out again and so on so here we can see um the yellow bars on this graph are how much solar we've consumed the purple bars are how much we've sent back to the grid and the blue bars are how much we've consumed consumed from the grid so you can add individual devices if you've got a bunch of these for example around your house like energy monitoring plugs you can then bring that into the energy dashboard as well i think that's basically covered the core concepts of home assistant so we've looked at adding devices now the devices you have in your house will vary hugely and what devices are actually supported by home assistant is growing by the day and by every new release if you find there's not a device that's supported you might be able to use a custom component through hacks if you just google hacks you'll be able to find out how to add that um there are other tools and add-ons as well that you can add but we'll talk about those i think in another video so when we did some automations we showed how to set those up we did some scenes we set it up with google and we've also um looked at the app and the remote access side of things so if that has been helpful please like and subscribe this video i want to do more videos like this about home assistant i'm going to do a few more advanced things as well i've got a fair number of fairly complicated automations on my own side of things which i'd love to try and show you um and go through and some of the other smart things that i've got going on here um so i'm going to make some videos on those things i've got a bunch of smart technology that i've been sort of building up around the place here that i want to do some videos on as well so there's some of that i hope coming up soon as well so yeah please like and subscribe i will hopefully see you on the next video in the meantime uh stay safe happy home assistant and if you've got any questions pop up question in the comment below i'll be happy to try and help with anything you might have i've put some links in the description below for things like how to get hold of the raspberry pi's um or where you might be able to find those as well as things like the raspberry pi imager that we looked at quite a long time ago now at the beginning of this video um so yeah good luck everyone i have a good um good exploration with the platform and i hope to see you soon [Music] i didn't record my screen you know what this is [Music] microphones run out i bet something's going wrong right then here we are no not right then i don't like that home assistant do you know what that is i do and i'm going to tell you a bit about it [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: Adam Cooke

Views: 28,090

Keywords:

Id: CWPlFVxNZmc

Length: 44min 26sec (2666 seconds)

Published: Sat May 14 2022