My Top Add-ons and Integrations in Home Assistant.

today i'm going to take you through a few of my most important add-ons and integrations so you can see how i'm using home assistant in my setup so let's get started [Music] as always i like to start my videos with the dashboard display so you can see a lot of the things that i run within my home assistant instance some of these are powered by the add-ons and integrations that i'm going to talk about so we're going to go over to the add-ons section under supervisor and i'm just going to show you some of my add-ons that i have going on here so this is my add-on list and it's in no particular order other than the alphabetical order that it comes up on the add-ons page and so we'll start with ad guard i use ad guard as my primary dns server for all of my devices on my network in fact i'm running two instances of ad guard one is running on this production server and the other is running on my backup server or my backup raspberry pi 4 and that's when i do upgrades or restart this host my family and friends that are on my network don't lose dns resolution ad guard is a very robust and very nice dns server that allows you to do a number of things for one thing you can set up client filters you can set up rewrites so for example if you're trying to access something inside your local network and you want to give it a dns name let's say bw dot you know domain name dot com inside your network you're going to want it to resolve to an internal ip address and externally you're going to want to resolve to your public so you're able to do dns rewrites you have a very nice query log so if you're curious what things are being queried on your network you can use different upstream dns servers there's a lot of built-in filtering so you have block lists so you have your built-in ad guard dns filter adaway is another another one you can build your own custom block lists and of course like i talked about the the log here you can see everything that's going on and then of course how you set up your devices they have a little bit of a help for each type of device that you might have in your network on how to use and set these things up so that's one of my very favorite uh add-ons next up is bit warden bid warden is an open source password manager with bit warden you can store sensitive information such as website credentials in an encrypted vault so it has a number of client applications so i run a you can see up here that i run a a chrome add-on and i also run this on my phone i run it on various things and it allows you to keep a list of passwords i have a video on this one as well and it allows you to for me store a bunch of different passwords for every site so i have a single password for every site that i log into none of my passwords are the same i don't have to remember those those are all stored here so i i always advocate using a password manager and you can read the full documentation there next up duck dns and i have a video on that of course as well duck dns allows me to remotely access my dn or my home assistant instance and it keeps up with my public ip address so when i go to domain.duckdns.com it redirects me back over to my home assistant server as long as i have my port forwarding set up correctly within my router then i can get to my instance from anywhere and if my public ip address changes then it updates my public ip address and updates the dns resolution so i can always get to my home assistant instance remotely file editor i use this occasionally i use it more on my development raspberry pi 4 than i do on this because i use visual studio code as a standalone application but what the file editor does is it allows you to go into your files on your device and it allows you to edit those right here within the browser window so if i want to edit my sensors i can just go into file editor and edit my sensors and any of the files that i have here so it makes it very handy and it's lightweight so it's quick easy to to spin up and doesn't take a lot of resources to run it's a very handy thing to have around if you need to do simple file edits so that's important for me as well the next few of these things or the next two of these go hand in hand grafana is an it says here open platform for beautiful analytics and monitoring and i use grafana like this you can see where i store all of my data and and stuff that i want to keep track of over time weather's a big one so with grafana i use all of my or i store all my weather data points in grafana now this grafana actually pulls from another add-on which is the influx db add-on grafana can pull from multiple types of data sources if you're running a mariadb or mysql or something else you can also use that but i happen to use the influx because influx db is a time uh based storage uh system if you will and so what it does is it stores these data points over time and then grafana pulls those data points from the database and just displays them directly in these visualizations that you can create and you can create all kinds of things with these with these visualizations another one i have here is a quick glance page it has a bunch of different graphs and gauges some of these are older not updated as much as they used to be i have a number of grafana videos so if you want to look at those videos make sure you check those out on my channel and make sure by the way that you subscribe to my channel if you're not a subscriber and hit that bell icon so you're alerted whenever i make new videos about stuff like this keeps you up to date on the things that i'm doing here all right so we've talked about grafana and we've talked a little about influx db now influx db also has the capacitor web ui that allows you to uh i'm sorry it's chronograph it allows you to explore your database directly without having anything else so if i go into explore here i can now search for specific things within my database let's see say i'm looking for temperature data points so i'll select data points here and this is not a video about using influx or this explorer but it is just an idea what you can do with this built-in add-on and so if i want to find a value these are all the devices now that have fahrenheit so i have a number of devices in my network or in my home assistant environment or ecosystem that provide fahrenheit data so that's another one so now that i'm using duct dns i don't necessarily need the let's encrypt but that is a very handy one to have too if you want to manage your ssl certificates with let's encrypt you can build out all of your and i'm not running it right now so i can't really show it but if you want to manage ssl certificates using um a challenge response mechanism let's encrypt is a good way to do that so that's an important one too mosquito broker if you have anything that you want to do mqtt wise and i'm pulling some data from one of my weather sensors using mqtt and there are a lot of things out there that will send data to you over mqtt this is an add-on that's important for that so this is a broker that you can use to pull in mqtt data and then when once it's in here you can build sensors and templates to pull that data into home assistant and use that for all kinds of stuff automation displaying storing it databases and that kind of thing another big one that i use is node red node red is my go-to choice for automations and the reason why that's the case is i used to have automations um in the early days of home assistant were much harder to build than they are today now with the graphical interface they've made a lot of strides to make automation so much easier within home assistant natively but i still enjoy node-red and i'll show you a couple things that i do with node-red just to show you an example of what you can do with it and of course node-red when it's tied and added to home assistant talks directly back to your home assistant instance so you can do all these things pull all this information directly from your home assistant setup so one of the things i like to do is check my fridge door for example let me hide this little window now remember i have a video on all of these things that i'm talking about today or at least most of them so make sure you check out my channel and check for these videos one of the examples i can do with with node red that's harder in maybe automations or was in the day was setting up a timer to check to see if a door was left open in my case the fridge door anytime the fridge door is open a two minute timer starts anytime it's closed the timer gets stopped through this little switch node here so if the timer expires it comes down here and checks my fridge door status if the door is still open or in this case the status is on which means it's open it will send me a notification to my pushover application which then sends it to my watch and my phone and all those places where i push over clients running it also announces it over my smart speakers within my house so i know the doors open this is especially important because i may not be the only one that's working with that fridge door somebody in the family may have it open so it just alerts anyone that's around to go ahead and close the door we don't have one of those smart refrigerators that can do that for us so this is a workaround and what i'm using for that for is just a little uh normal magnetic door sensor z-wave you can watch the video on that as well because i have a video on a lot of stuff right so check that out so node-red is a super important one for me i do a lot of stuff with node-red i use sportainer to manage my docker environment um that's that's okay for what i'm doing here and it works well i've had a few occasions where i had to go in and actually do something on the containers i don't use that very much because there's not a lot of need to do that right now this one samba backup or samba backup is extremely important i create snapshots one snapshot per day at says 136 random time 1 36 a.m i start a samba backup and what it does is it pulls a full snapshot and it moves it via samba over to my network attached storage my nas device and i'm uh if you want to learn more about that of course look at the video for that i know this sounds like a commercial for videos but uh it's interesting when i look back on these add-ons how many things i've created videos for so anyway there's a there's a video for this but it creates this every day i highly highly highly highly highly couldn't any higher recommend making backups and getting them off your device a backup is no good if you can't get into your device and then we as tinkerers mess with this stuff all the time we're going to break a configuration and we're going to prevent our system from booting up and then we don't have access to our snapshot so get something through google drive or this kind of samba backup or what's the other big backup thing there's another one there's three of them that i know for sure and ftp there's an ftp version get this stuff off your off your device onto another another something you can even with samba i guess put it onto another windows computer or something within your network or even a linux server you can store it on a directory there so point is make a backup that's why i think this one is very important to have because you need to be backing up your system every day regularly and then store it outside somewhere or off your device anyway all right a few more of these here sam bashir i use this because i again i talk about using visual studio code standalone and with visual studio code standalone i can connect to my sent to my configuration folder on my home assistant device using uh the samba share so i just share it terminal and ssh i use that sometimes if i need to run a command directly on the terminal that allows me to do that that's an important one unifi controller um i run a unify network here so my cloud controller or my controller is all on this box that is an add-on that's convenient for me here would it be better to maybe run it on a different system in case this goes down maybe but it's convenient to have it here as long as you're making snapshots at least you can get it back up and running if something fails i use wire guard for vpn access and then one of the final add-ons i have installed currently is my z-wave js to mqtt this is all of my z-wave devices within my network so this is how i control it now there's there's a whole discussion on z-wave i have a number of videos on z-waves z-wave j s open z-wave uh migration from point a to point b because uh we're moving from open z-wave beta to now z-wave j s in the home assistant ecosystem as the preferred way to run z-wave the z-wave add-on by itself there's z-wave add-on uh js add-on there's a z-wave js mqtt which is what i have here those two add-ons do the same thing for the most part the difference is this mqtt one even if you're not using mqtt allows you to have a visual ui for you to do things especially if you want to do things like configure your sensors or your z-wave devices so if i wanted to go to configuration and then update how often the thing wakes up or goes to sleep or how often a temperature is sent based on a threshold all this stuff can be done via the configuration on the ui now home assistant is iterating on this oh quite rapidly quite rapidly so that means that you can now set configuration variables for devices through home assistance call service calls but you still have a ui here to use that makes it a little bit easier you have to really understand the thing that you're working with and you have to understand what configuration parameters to set if you're doing it through the service calls here you have a ui in addition at least at this as of this recording you can't do firmware upgrades necessarily i don't believe so you can do a firmware upgrade uh for devices using z-wave js to mqtt not necessarily the native zeoxjs add-on again there's no real difference between these two with the exception of the updates this is this will be updated as its own add-on so if this add-on gets updated later than the z-wave js add-on then there might be a feature parody for a little bit but it's pretty close i personally will be running this uh for the the meantime and then one of the other reasons is i i run uh quick set 910 locks and the quick set 910 locks force are are forcing me to have to do a pole interval to get the status of the bolt so the door lock itself until that gets resolved in z-wave js i'm going to have to do the polling and i don't know of any way to do pulling within z-wave on home assistant the z-wave js add-on all right so i beat that to desk but to death but i think that's a very important add-on because this is what i run all of my z-wave network and my my home assistant is primarily z-wave and you can tell that by looking at my network and see whoops you can see here all of these things the locks all these lights a lot of the motion sensors the temperature sensors for internal stuff and all of that is z-wave based and so it's important my z-wave network functions all right so we've talked a lot about the add-ons what i do want to talk about briefly here is just a couple of the integrations that i use one of the most important ones here is the media player from this thing this allows me to voice out things that i want to talk about such as the alerts for the the fridge alarm those things i can talk to from here and and there's um let me see there's that one then we have the ecowit weather station the ecowit weather station is what i pull in my ecowit data from my ecowit gw 1000 wi-fi gateway which then listens for the transmissions from my backyard weather station and puts them in here esp home is another one that's where i start using my esp devices to listen for for example i have one in my refrigerator that listens to the temperature from a blow ble a low energy bluetooth device it sits in there uh my flume is my water water meter water pressure sensor that tells me if there's any issues with that uh printer is pretty nice because with the printer i can tell ink levels and we can look at that here this is what i get from my printer i can see what link inc levels are so let's say these two are getting they're they're less than half now if they get down to say 15 10 percent i can fire off an automation that tells me i need to replace these or at least order these these cartridges so they can be ready to go that's a nice thing to have what else do we have here so hacs is very important that's that's a whole video by itself but i talk about hacs and my back to the basics series so watch that it's essentially a repository for all kinds of add-ons that you can put into home assistant that are specifically for built by the core developers but they're built by the community so it's called the home assistant community store and that's what it's for um let me find some others that might be worthwhile of course the weather service i use for forecasts and things on there and some alerting this i use for my nest thermostats that that is a whole series of videos all by itself if you have nest devices and you want to integrate them in the home assistant that's probably one of the hardest ones we've had to do but that's available for you as well own tracks for location tracking plex media server the rochio ratcheo sprinkler system my rokus my shelly's that i use for flood alerts and other things i do a little speed test stuff here my synology that i talk to my synology with and then of course my unify and then my z-wave now this is what i talked about this this z-wave js integration talks to the add-on the add-on and integration translate talk back and forth and do all the work to get my devices my z-wave devices to show up in home assistant so those are just some of the add-ons and integrations that i use in my home assistant to make everything run around here i hope you found that useful again i make a lot of videos based on those add-ons so you can check those out uh look at my video list and my playlist for that if you have any questions about any of those that you're wondering about let me know down in the comments below again a reminder subscribe and hit that bell icon so you're notified when i do make videos and i do try to live stream every couple of weeks you'll get an announcement about that as well let me know if you have any questions on my discord survey as well and we will see on the next video

Channel: mostlychris

Views: 59,824

Keywords: Smart Home, Home Assistant, home assistant add-ons, home assistant, smart home, home automation, home assistant setup, homeassistant, hacs, home assistant automation, home assistant community store, addons, addon, add-ons, hacs install, zwave, smart home automation, home assistant install, z-wave js home assistant, z-wave js to mqtt, grafana, influxdb

Id: WrP8X09tKfg

Length: 19min 52sec (1192 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 13 2021