Meet Spook. A new toolbox for Home Assistant. It's SCARY!

boo did I scare you that's right we're talking about spook today it's a custom integration for home assistant written by Frank and spook is not your [Music] homie as always I like to go through the written documentation provided by the author of an add-on or a thing or an integration and this is no different this is Spook written by Frank I really hope I've been pronouncing that right all these years anyway spook is a powerful toolbox for home assistant it is not your homie so this is Frank's one and only custom integration for home assistant it's a little pet project that he has written and that he develops in his spare time and um what it's aim is to provide features and uh enhancements to home assistant that aren't necessarily mainstream or will be provided in the mainstream home assistant install um it's interesting he basically tells you not to use this if you would ever ask me if you should use spook I would say no uh using the least amount of custom Integrations is always preferred and that's basically what he's saying this is a custom integration uh the the fewer you use the more likely you are to have no problems with your home assistant instance so anyway he says slowly becoming a scary powerful to box for home assistant uh if you are comfortable using custom Integrations then then this spook might be good for you so we're going to go through installing spook uh after we talk about it a little bit more and then I'm going to put it on my production home assistant instance and just see what it finds because I haven't installed it anywhere but my developer or development system and we'll see what see what happens see if uh it something gets really scary so this is what spook is and let's start from what he says here spook is not not supported by the Home assistant project it is a custom integration written by Frank for uh for fun and U not supported it's provided as is without any warranty or support and has a very restrictive license uh you can read the entire restrictive license it is a passive aggressive license uh and has all the the stuff here it's quite long I'm not going to read all of this but you can go to the website and you can figure it out for yourself the website of course will'll be linked down below uh If you experience issues with with the integration or because of the integration uh he says please go cry a lot on your own After ignoring the warning you will not be provided with a tissue to dry up your tears when you're crying in a fetal position under your desk you have been warned uh I don't think it's as bad as he's making it out to be frank writes a lot of things he does a lot of work with home assistant uh he actually uh is a full-time nabuk Casa employee working on home assistant so he's not going to throw something out there that's going to completely destroy it but again as is uh if you break something go cry on your own and all that stuff all right now that we've talked about that what does it do uh there's a lot of stuff that is never going to be put into the home assistant mainstream project and so what what this spook does is it aims to fill some of those gaps there's some reasons for this if it's just too random out of scope not matching the philosophy violates architectural design early development experimental explorative or just useless spook doesn't care again he's nobody's homy so maybe that one feature you wanted in home assistant is in this toolbox provided by spook uh again all stuff in here is not part of Home assistant at least not yet for a reason don't expect it to work be supported or to be a good idea all that said spook is a scary powerful toolbox and I keep saying this spook is not your homie so what do you get spook is going to add some new features uh to existing services in your automations and scripts it creates new entities it allows you to monitor your home assistant Cloud connections including your connections back to the uh big box smart home speaker makers and it also floats around in your home assistant kind of like an uh an AP for you in the security world and it finds potential issues along the way it will tell you all that stuff shows up in the repairs dashboard it basically extends your home assistant instance with a huge set of scary powerful tools all right so if you're scared and you're like oh heck no and you're out then that's fine uh using the least amount of custom Integrations is always the best way to go so if this makes you uncomfortable don't use spook um he says it doesn't bite it doesn't deliberately break your home assistant system it's just not supported um so you can learn more about the background and history of spook to learn more about what it is and you can go to the frequently asked questions page uh so if we just quickly look at the the background uh created of course by Frank as I mentioned on February 23rd of 2023 he is a home assistant Enthusiast and has been in the community since 2016 you might have caught a few of his live streams in the past he is a member of the home assistant project and has worked on many home assistant projects since then and in 2019 he was hired by navasa to work full-time uh Frank reviews gazillions he says many but gazillions of contributions and is heavily involved in the architectural design F some of those things that that uh the community wants aren't going to happen um for various reasons so Frank felt the need to fill this Gap and started working on a solution and there was spook uh again it's a custom integration and all this stuff we talked about why the name spook uh Frank is Dutch and grew up with Casper the Friendly Ghost I can't say that part and spook is the Dutch word for ghost uh Casper is scary at first sitee but you get to like him it seems fitting for a custom integration that might seem scary uh but then you learn to love spook and it does all kinds of fun stuff for you not your homie is a reference to the live streams he used to do he called his viewers my home assistant homies or just homies and referring to you the home assistant user as its friend it's homie however spook is not your homie he is a ghost a spooky thing he's supposed to make you think a little bit about about what you are doing before you use it anyway you can read a little bit more about that here are the goals of spook it aims to add new services to existing integration providing control of features you can use inject new features into existing Services add extra new entities uh giving you more data points to Monitor and control and find and raise issues on your repairs dashboard uh for things that are found in home assistant and more I'm sure he'll continue to develop this as it goes along spook will use almost any trick in the book to get the job done it uses undocumented features private API monkey patching workarounds it uses whatever it takes kind of like those hackers and those APS while some features are not in home assistant for a reason you might be opinionated differently and there are those of you that are opinionated differently spook doesn't care he isn't here to judge or be the homie of anyone and who knows some features may turn out to be great after all and those might end up in home assistant one day so that is Spook the the background uh back to license page and then here we go I am in uh how do I install it so we're going to go through and install home assistant yeah we're going to install spook in home assistant it's very easy it is an hacs um or home assistant community store installation so all you need to do is have hacs installed and if you don't you should um there are a lot of useful Integrations and front-end devices devices frontend things in hacs I have a video in on installing HCS if you're not familiar with that so what we need to do is we need to go over to um my home assistant instance now and we're actually going to go to hacs and we're going to install our friend spook and I I jumped the gun here let me go back you want to make sure that you're selecting Integrations here so that's where we're going to go is Integrations and then uh we are going to explore and download repositories button in the bottom right corner and then we're going to search for spook so let me get myself out of the way here's the explore and download repositories button and we're going to click on spook or type spook and then we're going to click on spook remember spook is not your homie and then it brings up The Spook page and then once you're ready to go just download it and then you just click on download right here and away we go sip of coffee while we wait today's coffee is brought to you by jet fuel that is my choice of Brew for today uh who makes jet fuel I don't remember I'm not sponsored anyway so what okay there is uh there it is it's installed now next step is uh to go through here and we've downloaded it downloaded it now we we need to select the settings from the sidebar and we need to restart home assistant so once you install an integration via HCS HCS you need to restart home assistant and it tells you here you have one integration for which a restart is required so we're going to navigate to the restart page we're going to click the restart button and if I restart with my alarm enabled it's going to set the alarm off so let me disable my alarm okay now let's restart home assistant uh you can do a quick reload or restart you want the full restart in this case so let's do it and we'll be back after the restart oh more buttons uh yes now we'll be back after the restart okay home assistant has started as you saw right there next up we need to actually uh activate this integration we just created in hacs so I'm going to use the shortcut here with the c key go to my Integrations section and I'm going to click on uh or add integration down here and we're going to search for spook if you don't see this you need to refresh your browser uh like a hard refresh clear your cach something like that also if after that you don't see it then you didn't install the HCS integration properly or something didn't go right anyway it's here click on it and then here we go uh blah blah blah Did you read the read me did you read the license are you really sure once you click this button spook's going to start floating around your system and remember he's not your homie here we go I'm going to submit it because I'm a rebel uhoh in order for spook to finish setting up we need to restart home assistant again okay well that's fine makes sense I I restart home assistant 20 times a day when I'm doing something anyway no big deal so I'm going to restart it now and remember it's created the configuration for not your homie and now we've lost our connection and we will come back after this restart is completed all right see you in a minute okay spook has been installed spook is now floating around and oddly enough I don't feel any differently I expected to feel something nothing at all now what uh I should say something before I go any further if you don't have a backup if your home assistant system shame on you if you have a backup but you haven't looked to make sure it's backing up or an automated backup and you haven't checked it in a long time kind of shame on you make sure that you have a backup of your complete home assistant instance before you do something like install spook CU you got to remember he's not your homie spook is now floating around inside my home assistant instance if spook goes in there and he blows something up cuz he gets gets mad at me one day I got a backup I'm just going to restore back to when I didn't have the homie in there the non- homie in there right remember that back it up check your backups make sure they're actually exist all right now what I said that let's see what we can do with this spook dude spook thing uh using spook and home assistant now that you've installed it you can start using it it's really hard to explain what spook does because well it's hard and that means it'll be hard for me to explain what it does we're just going to see what it did since it extends the home assistant functionality everything you already know about home assistant already or still applies uh so first thing I want to do is I'm going to go over to the repair center I'm going to see if it found anything in my repair center uh that oh I hope that's not oh Good Golly yep we got some uh we got some issues here most of these are discovered by well all of these except for this top one are discovered by spook so spook is already floating around and it's telling me it's got unknown group members in cameras unknown group members and scripts so essentially I have a lot of groups that have unknown things in it so I need to go into my groups and fix all of that unknown source deck lights unknown source front porch lights uh if I click on one of these it tells me spook has found a ghost in your switch as X helpers while floating around spook cross path with the following helper deck lights the helper has a source switch entity unknown to home assistant so it doesn't know what switch deck lights JS is to fix this error edit the helper and adjust the source entity or remove the helper and restart home assistant congratulate or uh courtesy of spook not your homie so already spook has discovered a whole bunch of things in my home assistant instance instance that I need to figure out this is stuff by the way that I I have always wanted to know about I do a lot of things like these videos where I change things in my home assistant instance plus I moved to a new house and because of that I have renamed or moved or not installed certain things that were in the old house but I've never cleaned up my home assistant instance also didn't know how many things were really messed up so with our spook not your homie friend well he's not your homie so he's not your friend anyway with spook I now know that I have a whole bunch of issues here that I need to clean up and these are things that haven't actually broken my home assistant they're just cleanup items that need to be taken care of so that's one big thing that spooked is already found in my instance and it tells you how to fix it just like the repair center stuff does services are a common way to control home assistant we know that most of the actions you use in automation are by calling services spook adds new features to existing services that you can use in your automations and scripts it also adds new ones so spook will show himself on each of the services so you can identify which ones are his so if I go to my services page or developer tools and I look at Services if I just drop this drop- down list and I start looking through all of the services available here here is a a little ghosty hard to see on the video but there is a spook created uh action or service any more surely there's got to be more look for your little ghost friend on your service is yep so here's one home assistant add a device to an area add an entity to an area create an area delete all orphaned entities that's an interesting one like I mentioned in the repair center uh it shows a lot of things that aren't correct I also have a lot of entities that I've gotten rid of or not used in a long time so I could call this newly created uh service call that was added by spook and delete all the orphan entities um again just because you can doesn't mean you should so I'll think about that delete an area whole bunch of uh disabled devices entities all kinds of new stuff here uh so there are a bunch of things you can do with scripts now or new new service calls you can do in your automations with spook uh if you like to explore all of those spook provides a an if you like to explore all available Services spook provides and play with them from the comfort of your instance you can use the button this button here um to open your home assistant instance and show your service developer tools scroll through the list available and you notice spook being there that's what I just did alternatively you can take a look at our services reference page now this is all the stuff here that spook uh can do and by the way I will mention the documentation here is amazing these this whole side is full of things that you can do with uh with spook or how to use spook or what spook is uh and all of this stuff here so features core extension enhance Integrations helpers it's all in here so if you're when you are done with this video you should read through the entire spook stuff uh because I'm not going to cover it all make the video exceptionally long which it's already getting there uh spook adds new devices and entities to your home assistant instance giving you more data points so one thing that it has added is the home assistant Cloud so let me figure out how to get there you can find most devices and entity Spooks provides on The Spook integration page so if I go back to my Integrations and home home assistant and I look at The Spook integration page I should see all of the things that it provides here are all the new entities that spook has uh provided I believe y integration spook and then you can come over here and look at two devices here's one called home assistant H we're discovering This Together by the way I haven't seen this on my uh my production system yet where's the cloud thing I saw that on my other one I want to figure out how to view the home assistant Cloud uh so I can show you that let's see here see this is an example of that it tells you the state of all of your stuff device info H maybe it's actually spook uh here's some interesting things if you look at the repairs entity created by spook you have uh you can ignore all unignore all which is an interesting thing unignore all repairs ignore all repairs um and then you have 33 active issues zero ignored and 33 total you can actually add this to the dashboard although I don't know why you would because you already have a repair center and then here's spook H not sure why it's not showing me the cloud I'm sure I'm doing this wrong anyway you can you can see the cloud stuff um you can use my home assistant button below to open your home assistant instance and show The Spook integration page when I click on that what's it going to take me to um this may or may not work let's try it let see if that works yeah um it does not because I'm not SSL based yeah oh three devices now home assistant Cloud well that's interesting well this is what I was looking for so now you have uh all of your configuration for your home assistant Cloud you can actually automate the status of these things uh Google Assistant State reporting Alexa State reporting I just triggered everyone's speaker and then Google Assistant uh you can turn them on and off you can do state reporting and then I guess this is the nabuk casa stuff here so all that's available in spook now and that's what I was trying to show you okay what else uh features again you can go through all of this stuff here installing usage feature support core extensions extends the functionality of Home assistant enhance Integrations there are plugins they come in all sorts of type most commonly are the ones that are uh connect to device or service but they're more like helpers spook enhances the following home assistant Integrations by sprinkling some ectoplasmic goodness on top of them if you want to know what ectoplasm is there it is it may add new Services entities devices or even replace and extend existing ones so enhanced integration automations and it uh let's see non-working automations are a source of frustration let's see spook enhances the automation integration of Home ass system by raising repair issues in case it detect something wrong with an Automation and then automations are inspected for the use of areas if an automation is targeting an area in one of its calls that does not exist spook repay uh raises a repair issue there are always known limitations templates and automations are not evaluated by spook so any service calls that target areas dynamically using a template will not be considered by spook that's the one area area spook is blocked from spook remember he's not your homie anyway he's blocked from templates you'll see this uh limitation in a lot of areas under here it basically it looks like it adds new things it does enhancements so if we I mean Good Golly you you I'm not going to read through all these automations blueprints dashboards uh a dashboard in home assistant we know what that is uh while spook fling around it will raise repair issues you found something that's not right so dashboards are inspected for use of entities if a dashboard uses an entity ID in one of its cards it does not exist spook raises a repair issue the repair issues rais will contain the name of the dashboard and the entity ID that is referenced there is a lot of stuff that spook does that that will alert you in the repair center and we've seen what it does with groups home assistant Cloud uh what does it do here spook adds a single new device with entities for this integration to your home assistant so it allows you to fully enable disable your instance with this person this thing uh gives you state reporting uh it allows you to enable disable remote access from the web which is your nabuk casa stuff uh let's see so here are some use cases disable remote access when you are home using an Automation and automatically enable it when you leave your home disable Alexa integration when you are not using an automation or not at home sorry if I triggered that again disable the assistant here when you are not at home using an automation so you can read again read through all of this stuff here what else do I want to talk about let's look at scripts unknown reference devices so the repair issues again will be uh raised if there's unknown device looks for entities when entity ID does not exist same thing all this is pretty similar again go through all of this and then we have helpers we have an inverse helper that didn't exist before that's now available so you can make an off become an on or an on become an off basically turn the world upside down so this is helpful if you have a switch or binary sensor in a non-standard way or when the manufacturer of a device has decided to use the opposite Logic for the switch or binary sensor and they do exist it not just inverts the state of the source entity but also does all service calls in Reverse so if you have an automation to turn on a switch it will instead call the turn off service on the inverted switch so it also used to invert the behavior of a switch or binary sensor or entity this is really easy and fully done via the home assistant unitah and it tells you how to do that stuff here Services we talked about Services create an area delete an area and there's a whole list over here I mean just tons of stuff I think some of the most uh helpful areas are going to be uh the repair center it's going to be uh adding service calls that you didn't have before and then just the general awareness of how well your home assistant instance is running and whether it's um available via the cloud or not or whether your smart speakers can access it and whether the connection to those are available or working so those are some of the biggest things I see in spook I I would love to go through every bit of this and and do stuff uh but it's just there's just a lot here U so make sure you play around with spook get installed right now everything in my home assistant instance is working as it did before spook did not break anything spook is not designed to break anything he's just not your homie just keep that in mind if you have questions about this whole spook thing let me know or of course let Frank know as well because he's the author so let me see if there's anything else I want to talk about here we talked about the core Extensions by the way um core extensions are like turbo cartridge for your commodor 64 for those of you that remember that spook adds functionality to the very core of Home assistant this is not same as Integrations but it makes those Integrations run at the next level or level up as he says here integration management device management you can get a kind of an overview here enable disable that one integration on the fly now this is interesting you can actually turn off Integrations via I guess service calls so you click on learn more here disable or enable an integration so you for example I use tasmo admin when I want to do something with tasmota stuff but I don't use it on a regular basis so I can enable or disable that one as I need it via program calls if I'm doing something else uh device management program programmatically enable disable any device in home assistant using service calls I should have started with this at the beginning of the video apologies for doing at the end here because it's nice and concise and tells you what it's doing entity management automate controlling your entities using Services hide unhide enable disable and even delete all or entities in all one all in one go and every one of these has a little bit more information and specifics on how you do this stuff uh areas management make your areas fully Dynamic by adding removing devices and entities to them using Services you can even dynamically create completely new areas on the Fly we talked about devices and entities it adds a bunch of devices and entities that provide information and controls on the in over the internals of Home assistant disabling devices enabling devices and all that's over here uh as well and what else do we have here miscellaneous we have uh Services the following miscellaneous services are added restart restarts home assistant spook extends the existing restart service with a force option to force home assistant to restart immediately ignoring all safety guards just because you can doesn't mean you should restarting home assistant will interrupt all running automation scripts and integration it is recommended to use the service only when necessary so never unless you really really really really really need it when enabling Force home assistant or start immediately ignoring all say this means it ignore everything it will not check your configuration it will even interrupt database migrations and just just kill home assistant to restart as fast as possible what is that a K-9 on Linux k-15 kill Das a th000 this is not recommended and should only be used when absolutely necessary uh all right I think that covers it I think I've talked enough uh there are all kinds of things that you can go through read the documentation on here uh for me again like I said a minute ago this is going to be most useful for finding things to help me clean up my home assistant instance and monitor my connection to the various smart speaker systems and the cloud the nabasa so that I know if something has happened where I don't have a connection anymore and then some of these enhancements I I'll try out cleaning up orphan entities will be a big one um so clean up of my home assistant maintenance of my home assistant instance monitoring of specific things and then just the ability to extend some of the service calls that I already used on a regular basis all right holy cow this is this video might be 30 minutes long um may have to edit some of this down when you see this it might be shorter than 30 minutes but the recording is long all right thanks for watching let me get out of here so that I'm not wasting any more of your day and we'll see you on the next one

Channel: mostlychris

Views: 44,847

Keywords: Smart Home, Home Assistant, homeassistant spook, Home Assistant Integrations, hacs home assistant, HACS, mostly chris frigate, mostly chris mqtt, mostly chris, home assistant for beginners, home assistant ideas, home assistant developer tools, top home assistant add-ons, best add ons home assistant, home assistant install add ons, smart house 2024, smart home ideas 2024, home assistant setup

Id: Fsh4TTBji-U

Length: 30min 46sec (1846 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 14 2024