Home Assistant Beginners Guide: Installation, Addons, Integrations, Scripts, Scenes, and Automations

today on the hookup we're gonna take a look at the most powerful home automation platform available today home assistant I'm gonna run you through some of its best features add-ons that I think everyone should be using and most importantly I'm gonna show you how to get started right now in 2020 for free on the hookup I cover all kinds of connected products like robotic vacuums security cameras switches LEDs and window coverings but one thing that all the devices on my channel have in common is the ability to connect together using home assistant to make my home a smart home home assistant is a free local open source platform that allows products from hundreds of different manufacturers and protocols to integrate seamlessly with DIY projects and homemade solutions I'm not gonna sugarcoat it home assistant is extremely powerful but it's not without issues I was hoping to make a video that would show how much easier it's gotten to integrate all of your devices in the home assistant but after starting a fresh home assistant installation and attempting to add several integrations via the built-in UI I came to the realization that home assistant is still very much a beta product and will probably never be a plug-and-play solution that being said once you get your devices connected home assistant is extremely robust and dependable I have over 100 smart devices in my house that are connected and automated seamlessly in home assistant and I very rarely need to do any troubleshooting or upkeep if I haven't scared you away yet stick around for this getting started guide where I'm gonna cover installation options and instructions the 20/20 home assistant features tour and my must-have add-ons by the end of this video all have installed a fresh copy of home assistant on a virtual machine added in the sörman of off-the-shelf and DIY devices from different manufacturers and created a nice looking UI as well as automations scripts and scenes to control my new devices here we go at its core home assistant is a computer program and as such needs to be installed on a computer two years ago I think most people were installing home assistant on a dedicated Raspberry Pi and while that's still a pretty viable option a significant number of users including myself have moved their home assistant instances to a personal computer or an always-on computer in their house using a virtual machine a raspberry pot is still a good option if you don't have a reliable always-on computer available but a virtual machine is going to give you more power flexibility and reliability for completeness in this video I'm going to cover both installation methods starting with a Raspberry Pi installation you'll need a 32 gigabyte or larger micro SD card an adapter to connect it to your computer a separate Mac or PC and of course a Raspberry Pi start by downloading the home assistant image file for your specific model of Raspberry Pi as well as the etcher software that you're going to use to write it to the SD card after installing etcher start it up and select the home assistant image file in step 1 plug in your micro SD card to your computer and select it as the destination drive for etcher and then click begin once Etra is finished you can unplug your micro SD card from your computer and if you're planning on connecting your Raspberry Pi straight to your network via a wired connection you can just throw the SD card right in the Raspberry Pi and power it on but if you're planning on using Wi-Fi you'll need to plug the micro SD card back in your computer for a few additional steps navigate to your SD card which should now be called Hass OS boot and make a folder called config inside that folder you're gonna make another one called network and next you'll create a new text file called my dash Network then you're gonna paste in the template from the home assistant documentation and update your wireless networks SSID and password hit save and then delete the dot txt part of the filename eject the microSD card and plug it into your Raspberry Pi and the installation is automated from that point on as I mentioned before I've moved my home assistant installation from a Raspberry Pi to a virtual machine a little over a year ago and my smart home has never been more responsive or stable than it is today if you're migrating from a PI to a virtual machine I'd recommend that you'd follow my complete tutorial but here are the instructions for a fresh installation to start you're gonna need to download three files Oracle VirtualBox the VirtualBox extensions pack and the home assistant VMDK file start by installing VirtualBox and the VirtualBox extension pack then in VirtualBox click on new give your virtual machine a name and select linux as the type the bun to 64-bit is the default option just don't change it for now keep it allocated at one gigabyte of RAM and press next select use an existing virtual hard disk file and browse to that home assistant VMDK file that you just downloaded whatever you do do not start your VM at this point if you do you're gonna need to start over right click on the VM and click on the system tab under the motherboard heading select enable efi and then under processor you can change the number of cores available for your vm i'd suggest two cores next in the network tab click on the drop down and choose bridged adapter and then select your computer's main connection under name click on advanced and then under promiscuous mode select allow all press ok and then click on file virtual media manager right click on the home assistant VMDK file and choose copy then press next select VDI and press next again I'd recommend that you keep this file set to dynamically allocated so press next again give your new disk image a descriptive name like home assistant HD and hit copy close out of the virtual media manager and then right-click on your virtual machine again and select settings under storage right click on the SATA controller and select add hard disk select choose existing disk and navigate to that home assistant HD file that we just made and press open next you're going to remove your original VMDK disk by right-clicking on it and selecting remove attachment the last thing you need to do is go back to virtual media manager and expand the size of your new home assistant HD disc file up to 32 gigabytes then close the virtual media manager and boot up your virtual machine if you try out home assistant and end up loving it I'll leave a link down in the description with a short tutorial for how to get your virtual machine to run in the background on your computer and immediately start up on boot regardless of the method that you used when you plug in your Raspberry Pi or start up your virtual machine you'll need to give home assistant in a few minutes to startup and download some files after a few minutes open up your browser to has IO dot local port eight one two three to access your home assistant dashboard if your computer or network doesn't support mdns you'll need to find the actual IP address of your home assistant machine by looking at your router or using an app like fing once you've navigated to your home assistant instance you'll be asked to create your first user users can have different languages and themes associated with them and in the future you're going to be able to have different levels of access in different UIs but for now they're mostly used to log into the home assistant dashboard after creating your username you'll be asked to add any integrations to your smart home integrations are specifically configured platforms and services that theoretically don't require you to make any changes to your configuration file in my experience though most of these integrations have other dependencies that need to be installed or configured before using the integrations UI so I recommend just skipping this step for now after exiting the integrations configuration you'll be presented with the main home assistant dashboard and yours is gonna be pretty empty since you don't really have any devices yet the home assistant wiki shows all the devices that can be currently integrated into home assistant and how to get them working when browsing integrations there are a couple things to take note of the first is whether the integration can be added via the UI or whether it needs to be written into your configuration file and the second is the specific IOT class for the integration which refers to how home assistant knows the state of your connected devices when at all possible I try to keep all my home automation locally controlled this means that I don't need to be as worried about security it means that my devices will still function without an internet connection and perhaps most importantly it means that the future connectivity of my devices will not be endangered by business decisions that are completely unrelated to me the four main IOT classes are described first as either cloud meaning a remote computer that requires an internet connection or local meaning they communicate directly with a device or hub that's on your home network the second part of the IOT class description is how home assistant keeps track of the state of your devices push means that any change to the device State will be immediately communicated to home assistant and pulling means that home assistant will periodically contact the cloud service or device to ask for its current state local push will give you the most reliable instantaneous results and cloud polling will be the slowest and least reliable customer more's liked as mota and DIY projects like my motorized blinds use MQTT to communicate with home assistant which as you can see uses the best IOT class local push to begin to utilize these MQTT devices we're going to need to install an mqtt broker add-on on the left side of the home assistant UI you'll see a button that says haas io and clicking it will bring you to the dashboard where you can see any currently installed add-ons and whether any updates are available for home assistant the next tab over is where you can make any backups of your home assistant instance and then after that is the add-on store the add-on store simplifies the process of adding additional programs to your home assistant computer and even though it's called a store everything in it is free the first add-on that we're going to install is our MQTT broker which is called the mosquito select it and click install as with everything in home assistant the most important thing is actually to read the documentation in this add-on it says to install the app start it and wait for it to load up while checking the log for errors and then create a user for your MQTT under the home assistant user menu I'm going to call mine MQTT user and make my password and qtt pass but you should make something more secure next head over to the integrations page and you should see your mqtt ready to be configured click it and check the box that says allow discovery and after that you're all done with MQTT the next add-on that we should install is visual studio code which is going to let us easily add entries to our configuration file and add devices select the add-on click install and for this one we're just going to need to change the SSL entry in the config file to false because we aren't going to expose this home assistant instance to the internet yet then click start and check the logs to make sure that everything starts up properly last we're going to install the Samba share add-on not because you're going to be using it all the time but in the event that you really mess up your configuration file it may be the only way for you to recover it select the Samba share add-on and then click install by default this add-on gets setup without a password but I'd really recommend adding one since it would allow anyone who is on your home network to access your configuration files which could include sensitive login and password information for your home automation devices after adding a password to config file click Save and then start and check the logs for errors if you've watched my channel before you know that I also love node-red but in the interest of time we're gonna save that for a future video now that we've got all the building blocks in place it's time to get our devices added obviously everyone is going to have slightly different devices to integrate but there are four main types of integrations in home assistant the first type is Auto discovery which is exactly what it sounds like some devices may be set up in a way that home assistant can automatically detect them and integrate them Taz Moda for instance can be configured to auto discover by entering the command set option 19 space one into the Taz Moda devices console after setting up your MQTT the second type of integration is one that can be easily added using strictly the integrations UI and the configuration menu I'll be adding the Plex integration which will give me information about which devices are watching which shows within my house to add this integration I'll simply select Plex in the integrations menu which will send me to the Plex website to authorize home assistant using my Plex login and password I'll hit sign-in give it a minute to think select my plex server and then my integration is complete these first two integration types don't require a restart and your devices will be immediately available the next two will require additions to your configuration file and home assistant is going to need to be restarted before your devices are going to show up the third type of integration is a platform integration where many devices are added at once by adding the login credentials for a cloud service I'm going to add the two-year platform integration which will add any devices from my 2 Lea smart life app to my home assistant automatically to add this integration I'll need to go to my house i/o tab and open up visual code studio then click open web UI next I'll copy and paste the configuration from the 2u integration documentation into my configuration file and update the entries with my login information the last type of integration is a manual integration of a device type lots of DIY projects like my MQTT blinds have custom configurations that need to be added under a device type heading in your configuration device types include things like lights switches covers and binary sensors each of these device types should have only one heading and then multiple entries under them for instance if I wanted to add three of my custom MQTT blinds I'd add a single heading for cover and then three different entries for each of the three blinds 90% of the time when you add things to your home assistant configuration you're just gonna copy a generic template into your config file and then update any required information at this point we've added all of our integrations and we just need to check our work click on your username in the bottom left hand corner and hit toggle advanced mode now in configuration server controls you'll have a button that says check config hit that and then wait for a bit assuming it comes back with no errors we can then hit the restart home assistant button and give it a minute or so to reboot when the connection loss message goes away your new devices should be added depending on your setup home assistant may or may not automatically add these devices to the dashboard but with the introduction of the lovelace interface the home assistant dashboard is easier to use and more powerful than ever click on the three dots in the upper right and then select configure UI on the configuration screen you can add tabs or add organized groups advices in containers that are called cards these cards range from things like the super fancy picture elements card to the completely utilitarian entities card so it's almost everything that happens in my house is handled automatically or via voice assistant I almost never look at the UI and I prefer the simple entities card but if you wanted to have a tablet driven smart home the ability to create a beautiful custom UI is certainly there now that all of our devices are added and set up we can use home assistant for its intended purpose which is automation the three main tools in home assistant for automation are going to be scripts scenes and automations automations are going to allow you to select triggers and conditions to perform specific actions where scripts will tie a series of actions together and scenes are going to save the current state of several devices to be able to recall them later on in this quick demo I'm going to set up an alert that flashes a light on and off if my daughter's Kindle starts watching Plex during her reading time let's start by making a script I want this to you light bulbs to turn on and off three times with a two second delay in the middle so in the scripts menu I'm going to create a new script called flashlights then for my first action I want to call the service light toggle which will toggle the state of the lights next I want to add a two second delay then I want to toggle them again add another two second delay another toggle and another two second delay and then another toggle this turns the lights off and on twice and leaves them in the same state that they were when they started then go ahead and click the orange button to save then take note of the last few digits in the script URL so that we can add it to our automation later on in the automations menu we want to monitor my daughter's Tyndale which was added via the plex integration so for a trigger i'll select state and then for my entity i want my daughter's kindle and i need to specify a state that it changes to and if you're not sure about what the states would be called you can always test them in the developer tools section click on states and then find the device that you're trying to monitor play around on that device and see how the state changes you can see that in the plex integration it not only allows me to monitor to the state of the device but also things like the content that's being watched and the rating of that content in this instance I can see that when Plex isn't on the state is unavailable and when Plex is playing content its state is called playing so in my automation I'm going to make my trigger when the device goes from any state to a new state of playing next I want to condition my daughter is allowed to watch movies on her Kindle during specific times but she should only be using it for reading between 4 p.m. and 6 p.m. so I'm gonna add a time condition and put in the 24 hour format for after 4 p.m. and before 6 p.m. last I need an action which is where I want to call my script from before to flash the lights unfortunately scripts aren't called using their name but instead they're called using the number from that scripts URL so under action just start by typing in script and then select the script that has the same number as the one that you created hit save and then test it out hopefully everything worked as planned one realization that I had when making this video is how absolutely overwhelming this has to be for a new user also this video ended up pretty long already but I barely scratched the surface of home assistant usage perhaps the most important thing that I didn't cover is being able to access home assistant from outside of your network and setting it up to work on your mobile device but the great news is that if you do want to learn there are tons of resources available to you and lots of people willing to help on YouTube there are some great channels dedicated almost entirely to home assistant tutorials like Wan M Tech burns H a and digi blur di why both myself and dr. Zee's have facebook groups full of thousands of home assistant users who have probably seen and dealt with every problem that you could ever throw at them and there's a home assistant discord channel offering quick solutions to your issues most importantly the answers to all of your questions are probably in the extensive home assisted documentation that is if you're willing to do a little bit of light reading if you found this video helpful and you'd like me to make more like it please let me know by leaving a comment and hitting that like button thank you so much to all of my awesome patrons over at patreon for continuing to support my channel if you're interested in supporting my channel please check out the links down in the description if you enjoyed this video please consider subscribing and as always thanks for watching the hookups [Music]

Channel: The Hook Up

Views: 1,105,256

Keywords: home assistant, hassio, home automation, hass.io, smart home, diy, electronics, arduino, esp8266, nodemcu, wemos d1, automation

Id: sVqyDtEjudk

Length: 18min 40sec (1120 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 29 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/actionplant]

Nice job man. I always watch your stuff, even if it’s something I’m already doing, because I typically learn something new anyway.

[u/DarkbunnySC]

Back when I made my Tasmota guide a bunch of people asked me to make a similar video for home assistant. After editing the script from 9 pages down to 4 this is what I ended up with. I realize that if you are reading r/homeassistant you are probably aware of most of the information in this video, but I'm curious to hear what you think... who knows, you might pick up something new.

Timestamp Bookmarks:

2:30 RaspberryPi Installation

4:02 Virtual Machine Installation

6:22 Initial Hass.io Setup

8:55 Essential Addons

11:07 Adding Devices to HA

15:03 Scripts and Automations

[u/cmer]

A Lovelace tutorial would be fantastic as well. After over a year with HA I'm still struggling with LL. I imagine I'm not alone... Thanks!

[u/clickmeBrisbane]

Been waiting for something like this! Will watch later and get myself automated.

[u/dropcodex]

Thank god someone updated with better info

[u/sockrocker]

Just wanna chime in to say that your videos are great. I only ever causally browse YouTube but yours was the first channel I ever subscribed to.

[u/DPAmes1]

Wow, ambitious. Kudos!
But ultimately I think doesn't succeed for the purpose of introducing potential new users to Home Assistant. I've been running Home Assistant for about a year, starting from scratch with converting an Android box to a Linux server, testing OpenHab first, then settling on Home Assistant. Since then I've done a lot of additions and customizations, and I've been pretty pleased with HA. But I have to be honest - most new things I try to add to HA don't succeed easily at first attempt. Fortunately it usually only takes a few iterations of research and test to get it going (great support community!). I've watched some of your videos as part of that process. But it is a complex environment, and not that easy for the casual non-expert newcomer.
As a beginner I think my eyes would have glazed over and my brain opted out a few minutes into this introductory video. It tries to cover too much, sometimes in too much detail, and there isn't enough of a road map to make sense of the journey. It attempts to provide enough detail for beginners to follow along and succeed by just following the steps, including some alternative options, but that's just not possible - it's too complex, there's too many variations, and a virtual certainty of errors and misunderstandings that will trip up new users.
I think it would be better to make a higher-level overview video with a clear roadmap that's less intimidating and more informative for new users, then link to individual videos for each topic, like selecting your server and operating environment, obtaining and installing HA, initial configuration etc.

[u/Run-The-Table]

Good stuff in here.

One thing I would have KILLED for when I was starting out would be an explanation of all the smart device communication protocols. Nothing too technical, but something that would let me know that I can't run anything labeled "zigbee" or "zwave" without some additional hardware.

Not everyone starts their home automation journey with a half-built kit. I started with literally ZERO "smart" devices. Things become easier once you limit your scope to working with devices that you want to work.

Just my two cents. Keep up the good work!

[u/hans_gruber1]

Thanks for this, had Home Assistant on my list of projects to get started with for a while, so got this bookmarked for when I get chance to make a start!