Home Assistant Tutorial Part 2 - UI Walkthrough, Integrations, addons, and cloud backups

hey it's joe fair with key toolkit in this episode we're going to talk about things to do after you've got home assistant installed in the last video i talked about home assistant installs i got you right up to the login screen as part of that i talked about how all those different install types are based on what kind of person you are and what you value for instance if you're a person that's very technical and wants to manage your rit there's gonna be certain install types that are right for you and so on in this video it's gonna be very similar where i'm gonna talk about different things that i do and i'll explain the pros and cons or kind of like why i do them and from that you'll be able to take what works for you and then at the end you should have a home assistant install setup that will be right for you and write for the things you want to do with it before we get started let's talk about some of the lingo of home assistant so we understand the vocabulary so we're not trying to learn that and the user interface at the same time an integration and home assistant is basically like the language that you use to talk to a different device in your home this is some of the integrations for home assistant and this is the way i like to think of them i have like a samsung smart tv in my house i have kodi media center i have wled leds and so if i want home assistant to talk to those i need an integration so it knows how to speak the language and talk the talk so to me the integration is the communication layer and there are 1700 integrations as of october 2020 so you can talk to a lot of different things and integration doesn't mean 100 functionality for instance arlo makes smart cameras but i can't actually talk to any of the video on a smart camera i can't get that data off the arlo i can't get things like the temperature and humidity on the baby camera but i can't actually get the video so keep that in mind about integrations is sometimes just because the integration is there it doesn't mean everything works a device is a physical object in your home that uses the integration to communicate with home assistant so the integration is the communication layer the device is a physical layer it's a physical thing that gets talked to the reason it's important is you can have multiple devices for one integration and you often do if you have light switches and you're using like a z-wave integration you might have 10 light switches that are using one integration for the arlo cameras i have three arlo cameras that use that one arlo integration and i have a couple of samsung tvs in the lower right i have varoni lamps i did a video on these they use the wled integration to actually set the colors of the lamps themselves lower left i have a printer i'm going to actually deep dive on that in the ui and talk about printers and and how a home assistant talks to my printer as just an example entities there's multiple entities per device for example on the printer device each one would have a printing status of if it's printing or not and then the color in black ink level entities are interesting because they're typically things that can be queried so such as sensor data temperature data motion data stuff like that or they're things that can be set such as the light brightness a light color and so on my w led or the veroni lamps they have an led color value that is an entity i can set to set them to any color i want darla baby cameras are all things i would read but that has temperature humidity air quality so there's actually quite a few entities on this one device for each device in my home so going back to the printer example the status that i said was an entity can have the value of either idle or printing these are called states and states are what you query in an automation or set in an automation so if i was wanting to set a light to be red i would query the entity of status on my device printer to see what the state is and if if it's printing then go set that light color that's the next video that i'll talk about where we actually set up automations but that's why i'm going through this vocabulary so that we can speak with that lexicon basically and everything will make sense to you at the top of the hierarchy is the integration this was the language that home assistant uses to speak to a device of that integration the device is the physical object that uses the integration to communicate with home assistant this could be like the tvs the printers or whatever under this are the entities these are things about the device that we can either set or read and then under each entity is a state which is the actual current value of that entity do it again but we're going to do it with real words and real examples so the printer would be a integration that i can install to have home assistant talk to my printer hewlett packard printer is my physical device my printer that's in my office that is using that integration to communicate there are three things on my printer that i can query to find out um about the printer and these are my entities and then these are the values that come back and these are my states okay i know that's a bit dry but if you sat through that and understand it then it makes all of the other videos and all of the other stuff about home assistant makes so much more sense we can now jump into the user interface and have a lot of fun because we don't have to worry about the jargon we can actually just see how this stuff's laid out in the actual program itself you start at the overview page on the right-hand side here this is a lovelace ui it's very customizable this rectangle here is what's called a card this is the weather card you can have different cards for different things click on them and get more information these up here are called badges i know we don't need no badges but right now we do this one's by default comes in it's called the updater the updater will show you if you have an available update to home assistant it's one of the built-in badges that you get this one here is your user badge it says uank because it doesn't know where i am this is all about presence you can actually install presence detectors or do presents for things like if i'm connected to my network i must be home then you can do automations on that say if i am home do this if i leave home maybe turn on some security cameras stuff like that the sun one is just exactly what you'd think it's the sun if it's above or below the horizon you can do stuff like turn on lights when the sun's down these are some defaults that you get with home assistant you can remove them if you want they're actually very useful and don't bother me so i leave them right there this is the map the map was that presence thing now the presence is not only if you're home or not it has zones you can edit it by clicking this little pencil up here in the right upper right corner you'll typically have the edit icon in the upper right hand corner of the ui and you'll have the add icon in the lower right corner so get used to that look at icon you see it here the little plus fun add a zone i can click here give it a name i can also edit the zones here this is the one if i'm getting ice cream and i'm within this range i must be getting ice cream if i'm in this rain going to work i can have automations actually fire based on where i'm at that's called geo fencing or geo location based automations that's what the maps for it's allows you to set those zones the log book and the history are just different ways to view things that have happened so i can go here and it defaults to like the last day or so i can see that my printer went to idle it was actually offline i can see that the sun's gone up and down and also this actually home one this is actually that weather card so it was cloudy and rainy i live in washington it's just how it is developer tools are all about things that you would use to debug automations or find out if stuff that you installed is working so i can see here here's all my entities supervisor now there's two things that we can manage we can manage devices in the house and we can manage home assistant itself the supervisor tabs where we manage home assistant itself you can see here we've got a pending update i can click on update to do the updating of the home assistant portion this update here is for the operating system this is because i'm running full home assistant on has os now the thing to know here is that there's a release note link i highly recommend reading the release notes this thing's in beta so they will break stuff unabashedly make sure you read the release notes look at the breaking changes so that you don't get broken the add-on stores the next thing here it's like a store except for everything is free it's great you want to add stuff you can click on it and install it we'll do that in a second snapshots is their name for backups it's like taking a snapshot of every all your settings and everything really handle is handy especially before you go do that update thing the system is going to give you an overall view of your system it allows you to reboot it this is used quite often so keep in mind you click on supervisor you click on the system tab up here you go and reboot and this is how you get your stuff rebooted here's your system metrics that's also useful for obvious reasons if you want to know about your usage you can click on the triple dots here and go to hardware and actually see the usb devices that are plugged in this is useful too if you're trying to configure some dongles all right let's move on to configuration because this is where we actually configure devices and things that we care about inside of our home the top thing on configuration home assistant cloud this is a way to access home assistant remotely we'll get into that in another video here we go integrations devices and entities this is what we went over on our low vocab lesson so let's talk about it on the integrations we can see the integration show right up these are ones that were auto discovered on my network i also have the internet printing protocol installed right here this is what allowed my printer to show up if i go over to devices there's the printer that is using that integration that's the physical device and then if i click on entities we can see all of my entities and then if i look at these right here there you go there's the hp mv 87 or 7800 this is the one that says if it's printing or not um this is the one for the ink color for black and color here so this is what i was talking about where you have a bunch of entities show up for your devices not everything ends up as a device entities may be other things so you see that the ice cream location we threw together that actually shows up as an entity the reason being is we can use these for automations and they show up as different things the sun also is there's no physical device for the sun well at least not one in my home thankfully but the sun shows up as an entity that we can use for automations and we'll get in automations in the next video one last thing i want to talk about is areas areas are just basically you can name and create any area and then you can do grouping on areas which is really helpful if i have my hewlett packard printer in my office then boom i can throw that in the office location i can throw lights in there and then i can do things like say turn off this off and have everything in the office turn on or off here is another button this is the user button and when you click on it this allows you to pick themes and such if you have them installed it also allows you to turn on advanced mode right here which will turn on some settings that are really helpful okay there's three ways to install integrations there's the ones that are self-discovered like this here there's ones that can be added from the ui which you click on the plus button here and you basically select what you want to install and then you would just go through the install put buttons here finally there's a way of doing it through the config file which we'll talk about later when we get into add-ons but it's a bit more of an advanced way of adding things the nice thing is being able to add things to a user interface is really handy and works for most things right now in each release they do they move more stuff over to the ui which was really nice the next thing i want to talk about is the user interface because now that you have integrations and you know how to install them you're going to want to know how to actually see what's going on with them so you can see here i know i have my hewlett packard printer installed but i don't have any cards for it click on this triple button here and say edit dashboard now we can actually edit this ui here what i'm going to do is i'm going to leave this home one alone i'm going to create a new one call it printer this is a a tab basically that will be shown and you can see here i've got home and printer now now these are called views so if i go to the printer view we can again edit this here the plus sign we know that this is how we add things we can click the plus sign here and then we can add by cards we can also add by entity i'm going to select the entity here and i'll click on this printer what's cool about this is it'll give me options for what kind of cards and i'll try to guess one that would work really well now this entity right here is if the printer is printing or idle i'm going to go something basic i'm gonna go with just the entity card which just shows it like this now let's add something else let's add the ink levels and the ink levels i think would be really cool as a gauge so what i'm gonna do is add this gauge here and i'll add one more for the ink for the color ink so there you can see we've got color and black and then we've got the idle section here click the close button all of the edit buttons go away and now i've got a nice simple tab that shows what my printer is doing and how my ink levels are at this point you can now go have a field day adding entities in your home and then adding user interface and make this customized to look however you want we'll talk about theming in another video but we can actually edit the colors and so on here as well and then this right here you saw this was a gauge card they have what they're called custom cards so you can actually have one that maybe has multiple gauges or just an entirely different look there's a couple other things that i think we should do before we leave one of them is install a couple of add-ons and then we should create a backup so let's go to the supervisor tab here and the add-on store now here's a bunch of add-ons that are available and i'll talk about a couple that i think are useful for everyone just starting out here this checkout home assistant configuration is a very interesting add-on what you do is you select it and we'll say install and while it's installing i'll talk about it this add-on will actually install the next version of home assistant for you and then it will find out if there's anything that would conflict before you upgrade to use it you simply click the start button let it run and then when it's done running you can check the log over here now every add-on has these four tabs when you've installed it the documentation tab is super important and i highly recommend reading through any documentation to find out how an add-on works and how to configure it very often when you install an add-on you're going to want to go into the configuration portion and configure it for this add-on it's a little special you actually just hit start and you'll see what happens is it installed the next version of home assistant it takes a copy of the configuration checks everything and then i'll hit refresh here and we will see click on the log file here you can see that it's completed and there is no errors found this means i can update now the logs are really important thing anyway for any add-on because if you hit any issues with the add-on check the log the other thing to know about add-ons if you're starting out here is if you click start on an add-on and then it stops almost immediately go check the log keep in mind the logs don't auto-update so you want to hit refresh and see what's going on here let's install another add-on that's a little bit more complex but also incredibly useful and that one's called samba someone exposes what are called file shares and this allows you to browse the files that are on your home assistant server very easily here's the zombie share we're going to click install this will get the initial install and then notice that you just have info and documentation when it's installed you get all four okay now that we've got it installed it says start down here we can go over to documentation and read through this this will show you the configuration and talk about different aspects of the configuration and what they do which is really handy once we understand that we can click over to configuration and we can see that the default password is null one quick note common thing that people hit here and i want to thank my friend roy for explaining this one to me that because he hit it is if you see the term ssl in the configuration this is for an encrypted communication to your home assistant from a remote source for now what we're doing is setting up home assistant to only be accessible internally to our home network and that's kind of how i keep mine i don't actually expose anything over ssl so if you see the words use ssl here you're going to want to set that to false for any of the add-ons you're doing if you don't what will happen is you'll typically get an error what i've done here since i've got the configuration i'm going to give it a password here give it a the password password we're going to hit save down in the lower right go back to info and hit start and then we're going to see if this starts if it were to say start here still then i would know it had failed but since it says stop i can tell it's actually going right now i'm going to click over in the log and take a look and everything looks like it's popped up and there i've gone to the network share of slash home assistant and there's my folders if we go to the config folder i can see my configuration yellow right here and this is where i would do some of the more advanced add-ons i would actually add them in here all right this is great that allows me to get those config files if something were to go wrong or if i need to edit them and it also shows you how to install add-ons yourself all right now that we've done this and we've kind of walked through add-ons we've walked through the ui the next thing and final thing we'll do here is talk about backups we're going to go back to supervisor here and go to the snapshots section if i want to create a backup of my current configuration i can just say if i want a full or partial i'm going to say full i can give it a password if i want to protect it simply hit create and there you go there's my backup for today i can click on this initial one and i can say i want to download it or i actually want to restore it which would install that backup so it's very easy to back up to a certain level area and restore it really ideally what you'd want is to be able to back up to the cloud so let's talk about how to do that i use this one right here it's called home assistant google drive backup it's very very popular it's very well done it's by uh sabitian on github i'll have a link to his repository here he has a great description of how to install it but just to do the walkthrough for those that like video better what we're going to do is go to supervisor we're going to go to add-on store we're going to say add repositories right here if you don't have this one you can just paste his github there click add and there it is there's the home assistant google drive repository because when we go to add-on store now we go to the very bottom here you can see there it is and then you just install it like any other add-on i'm gonna say install uh i'm gonna also say show in sidebar and remember the sidebar is over here so if i say show in sidebar there it is snapshots we can read the documentation this tells us all of the fancy things that you can configure on this i'm going to go over the configuration tab and make sure that these look okay this use ssl this one can bite you uh this is very common in most add-ons and what it's about is a encrypted way of accessing the add-on remotely since we're just starting out i'm not going to expose my home assistant to the cloud or to the i should say to the internet so i'm going to turn ssl off that means that the only way i would access this is on my whole local home network anyway okay we're going to go back and we're going to hit start here and see what happens and we'll click on the log and hit refresh this is a really common thing that you're going to do you're going to hit start you go to the log hit refresh you make sure everything looks good okay so we've got the ui here there's two different ways to do a web ui if you've got it on the sidebar here you can click here also the a lot of add-ons will have an open web ui in the lower right here and click on this and this will walk us through how to get started so the first thing it wants to do is authenticate i'm going to hand it my email address here and get the credentials now for me sending credentials never work so i'm going to copy this here and then we will go back to the app so let's see on the supervisor and basically just paste it into here i'll click save okay so now we're configured and it's got my backups and it knows what backups are my local ones so in home assistant i've got three right now and then in google drive i also have three and this is really nice because i can click here and i can say if i want to restore right from the cloud i can also install a fresh version of home assistant go here restore from the cloud now the nice thing is it's going to do stuff to make sure it doesn't overflow my google drive by only saving a couple of them so we look at a little bit closer to get to it go to dashboard and then there it is home assistant google drive backup and if we look at the configuration we can see that it's going to keep four snapshots in has io and four in google drive and then it's gonna snapshot automatically every three days that's really handy it's gonna maintain all of my backups for me every three days i'll be good to go i can change this if i want something more aggressive and then if i click here i can see there's a lot of settings that i can change to make it basically do what i want that was a really fun video and i think that will get you to the point where you can add stuff to user interface you can add tabs you understand what entities and integrations are and so on we went through a lot in this video we also got everything backed up this is a lot of the boilerplate stuff to get going with home assistant from here we can actually start doing things like automations now where do you go from here i'm going to continue this series because i've had a lot of requests for it and i think the community needs it it's a very hard series to do though because home assistant changes so often that things will break and become outdated very quickly if you look on youtube on my home automation playlist you'll see a bunch of places you can go from everything from setting up z-wave to to you some of the devices you can add on this is a 3d printed wled project smart mirrors dashboards all sorts of stuff even home automation tablets if you want to put that together and actually have a tablet on your wall to control your home there's also other places to go here so if you look at the future channels on my channels here a number of them including dr aziz the hookup pinky wafer these are all people that are doing amazing amazing home assistant tutorials and also are incredibly technical and incredibly deeply versed on this i want to appreciate you watching this i hope this was helpful if it was please give me a thumbs up to let me know that this is more of what you want to see let me know in the comments what you thought of this video format if it was too fast too slow if explaining the the verbiage at the beginning was helpful for you or if that was just a waste of time and i'll adjust this accordingly all right thanks for watching i'm joe fair with geek toolkit till next time you

Channel: GeekToolkit

Views: 7,973

Rating: 4.98773 out of 5

Keywords: Home Automation, Home Assistant, Install, home assistant raspberry pi, Home Assitant setup, Beginners, Raspberry Pi, Raspberry pi projects, Home Automation ideas, home automation setup, smart home, home automation, hassio, smart home automation, home automation ideas, Home Assistant Core, diy home automation system, DIY Home Automation Raspberry Pi, home assistant guide, home assistant setup, home assistant beginners guide

Id: pdA4h11_UWU

Length: 21min 47sec (1307 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 19 2020