Quickly getting started with Home Assistant (2021 Guide)

hey everybody welcome back to this episode of building a smart home cheaply in our previous video we went ahead and installed home assistant on either a raspberry pi or a virtual computer which means now we're ready to actually log into home assistant and check out the user interface soon enough we're gonna be setting up our own home automations and our homes are gonna be coming to life if you're enjoying the series so far and you haven't done it yet go ahead and subscribe so you can be notified of future content beyond just getting home assistant set up i'll be putting out videos regularly on different home automation ideas that you might be excited about that you could do at your home for cheap the goal of this project is to keep home automation simple and affordable my goal is to make sure that everything i can do you can do as well if you're ready to continue let's do this all right first things first in the previous video where we last were we were on the home assistant web interface on the create account page go ahead and create an account because i've already done that once you've created it will be synced up and you'll be ready to continue following this video and the next page that you're going to see is something that lets you define the name of your home as well as the location you might be wondering why it wants the location of your place the first thing knows that this data is actually kept local on your device it's not being shared with any services the second reason to set up your home location on home assistant is so that when you're going to a place leaving your apartment leaving your home there could be an automation that's triggered when you exit your home so that's why location is one of the first things that it asks you about if you click the detect button it will automatically select an approximate location as to where you are based on what your browser is telling home assistant and if you want if it's not very accurate and it probably won't be you can just double click on the correct location and it will set it there um go ahead and put in your time zone if it hasn't automatically put that in and the elevation is you would think unimportant but the reason why they ask about elevation is so that if you want automations based off of sunrise and sunset the elevation is actually very important in determining your sunrise and sunset times so just go to google one of the first results you see if you just type in your city's name and follow it by elevation so on wikipedia i can see atlanta is 320 meters and choose your unit system here and then you're going to press next home assistant is an evolving product so the ui you see might be different than uh what i'm seeing but roughly it should be about the same in my case the next screen i see lets me choose which devices i want to set up with home assistant but we're not going to do that just yet i'm just going to press finish and now we're logged in right off the bat you're going to notice a couple things you're going to see that uh there's a weather card you might be wondering why home assistant wants to tell you the weather everything that you're seeing on home assistant can be used as data for an automation so we have the weather for instance every data point is called an entity so in the case of weather we have a weather entity that we can use to trigger automations for instance you come home and it's cloudy turn on the lights but if you come home and it's sunny outside chances are your living space is going to be bright enough and you don't need the lights to come on okay i'm going to go ahead and zoom in a little bit so that you can see things a bit more clearly i'm going to press stay logged in and the first screen is your home screen so one nice thing about home assistant is that you can actually rearrange the elements on a page and you can organize it in the way that you would like some people get really carried away with this and they will set up their own colors and customizations we're not going to dive into that at least not yet our focus is going to be more on getting familiar with the ui and then setting up automations currently we only have a few entities or data points but if we wanted to rearrange elements on this page you would click the icon in the top right and you would click configure ui now one important thing to note is that you might get a prompt about taking control of the ui and what they're saying here is essentially that once you press the take control button new entities that are discovered by home assistant new devices like philips hue or any other smart home devices you have will not be automatically added to the home screen anymore they're going to be registered in home assistant but they're going to be tucked away and you have to manually add them to the home screen so that being said if you don't want to play with the ui and you just want your entities to automatically show up on the home screen in the overview page then click never mind and you can just skip ahead in this video for the people that are curious go ahead and click the take control button and you can see some new buttons and icons show up on the page the first thing you'll notice is the pencil icon so if we want we can rename the home tab to say something else like overview you can also set an icon to set an icon home assistant uses a icon package called material design icons and so to find the right icon go to materialdesignicons.com and in my case i just want a dashboard icon so i'm going to search for dashboard and we have some options here so i'm going to choose this one i can see that the name of this icon is view dash dashboard so i'm going to copy this and i'm going to paste it into the icon field and you're going to prefix it with mdi colon and on the right you will see the icon preview the next tab on this screen is badges which determines which items you want displayed at the top of your screen right now just off the bat we have something called updater which is just the version updater for home assistant which is actually pretty convenient basically home assistant will automatically detect when new versions come out and then you can install them so that badge right there will change when there's a new update available it'll also tell you in other areas of the ui when an update is available you might see something called person dot and the name of the account that you just created that you're logged in with and you might see something that says like unk essentially it's saying unknown and the reason it's saying unknown is because it doesn't know the location that you're at currently because we're not actually providing home assistant with that information we told it the location of our home but it doesn't actually know where you are as a person we'll be diving into how to get home assistant to track our location for automations in another video at the bottom here you can see you can add an additional entity based on the entities that you have available so if you wanted to add a badge for the weather you would click on this nd field at the bottom and you could choose whether and now we can see another badge would be added at the top in this little badge preview that says partly cloudy if we go to the visibility tab we can choose which users can see the page that we're currently editing you can actually create multiple accounts on home assistant and we'll touch on that later in this video so let's go ahead and click save and now we'll see if you would change the icon an icon shows up at the top you'll notice that the text no longer shows but an icon has replaced it that's how icons work in home assistant if you'd rather it just be text then you can remove the custom icon that you added and save and then it will actually show the text label now instead also at the very top if you want to change the name of your home to something like my smart home press save it'll also change the title of your home assistant there's two more things i want to touch on in regards to customizing the ui the first would be that if you want to add an additional page you just click the add view button and you follow the template that we just used before for the overview page or whatever page you decided to call it if you want to add additional entities to the ui you'll click the plus button in the bottom right you'll see that there's a bunch of different cards as they call it which let you choose how you want to display your entity if this seems kind of overwhelming then just choose the entities card in the top right and that will be the simplest one and here you can choose which entities you want to add to the entities card so in this case i want to add me and then i will add the weather again and so here we have a card and we can call it something like i don't know briefing and we can see that it lists me as a person it says my location is currently unknown and then it also lists the weather for the home the show header toggle if you enable it or disable it you'll see that it shows up and disappears in the top right corner of your card this is like a toggle switch so that if you had lights or some sort of device that can be powered on or off this little toggle on the top right of the card will turn off all the devices in that card let's click save and now we can see our card's been added so that's pretty cool and then once you're done click the x button in the top left corner and now our changes have been saved because i currently only have one page set up the tab that had the icon that i selected doesn't show up anymore but if i were to add another page i would have a tab view at the top on the left is a menu for home assistant if it's collapsed you'll just click the hamburger icon in the top left and it will expand it the next item on the menu is map and the map shows you your home location but it also will show you where your devices are if their locations are being tracked the circle defines the entire zone which you call home that way if a device enters or exits this radius you can have automation's trigger based off of that furthermore if you were to enter that radius home assistant would mark your location as home because that's the name of the zone by default you can't change the size of the radius of home to do that requires going into some files so we're not going to be doing that the default radius is probably fine unless you're living in a multi-block mansion and you can click the plus button in the bottom right to add another zone so say you want to add a zone that's called work let's change our icon to be a briefcase so mdi colon briefcase and then there'll be a little dot in the corner that you can drag and expand to choose a larger area when you're done press create now you'll see that your zone has been added to the map now if you're tracking your phone's location through home assistant and you enter that zone home assistant will then mark you as being in that zone and you can have automation's trigger off of that all right cool the next item in the list on the menu is logbook the logbook keeps track of the recent events that have occurred that home assistant has tracked since we have no entities set up currently the only log item i have is home assistant started but if lights were turned on or off if motion sensors were activated or deactivated or if you arrived in a location or left a location home assistant will track it here and you can use the start date and the end date and even the entity scope to narrow down the items in your logbook following logbook is history which gives you a graphical display of your entities and what is known as their state the sun's state has been above the horizon since we started home assistant we can also see that the state of the home weather has been partly cloudy there's another item on the list called developer tools this is more of a technical overview of home assistant but now you can see the terminology come into play here we have a column that says entity and here we have a column that says state here's a list of all the entities registered with home assistant and in the middle category is their state we'll see that the sun entity is above the horizon but then we can also see a third category called attributes but you'll find that home assistant is actually providing more information than we even saw before for instance for the sun entity we can see the next sunrise the next sunset when midnight is when noon is the elevation of the sun and whether or not it's even currently rising still for weather we can see the humidity the pressure the wind speed so yeah that means you could get as specific as triggering an automation based on the outside humidity so say you had a home that was prone to humidity when it was humid outside you could have a smart switch set up with a humidifier or if your humidifier is a smart device then it can integrate naturally or natively into home assistant and you can have your humidifier turn on automatically now i realize most humidifiers will automatically do that anyways but that's just an example next on the home assistant menu is supervisor if we go into the add-on store you can see a list of all the available add-ons for home assistant if all these things came pre-loaded on home assistant it would be a very bloated software so i actually appreciate how they're all separated a lot of these are actually created by the community and managed by the community there's all sorts of cool little things here one cool thing would be air sonos if you've bought sonos smart speakers in your house but they were older and they don't support airplay this actually gives them airplay functionality another one like aircast where you can actually airplay to your chromecast devices there's all sorts of other things too you can install plex media server if you're a developer you can install and run visual studio code in my opinion some of these are a bit excessive but they're a nice fun quick easy way to launch some of these services that are offered there is one specific service i do want to focus on which is duck dns we're going to go over this in another video but duck dns is what will let us access home assistant when we're not even home this isn't a requirement but if you want things like your location to be tracked for automations you're going to need home assistant to be able to communicate with your device when you're not in your home network next on the page is configuration you might notice something that says home assistant cloud this is actually the quick and easiest way to get your home assistant to be accessible remotely or when you're not in your home network the only thing is that it costs money so i'm going to be going over in the next video how to set up remote access for free and also how to set it up via home assistant cloud which is more intuitive but does have a subscription cost which helps fund the home assistant project integrations will actually let you configure and set up any devices that home assistant has automatically discovered on your network by clicking the configure button you can actually add the entities into home assistant so let's try that with google cast as we can see it's automatically discovered my kitchen display my bedroom speaker and my shelf display for the areas i'm going to put kitchen under kitchen shelf under my living room and bedroom speaker under bedroom i can even add a new area areas are kind of like groups which help track which devices are in which space go ahead and click finish and now if i go back to my overview page i can click on the button in the top right configure ui the plus button i can click on as i said earlier the entities card which is the simplest and i can call this google and i can go to the entities list and i can locate the entities that home assistant has added for google so we have my bedroom speaker my kitchen display and my shelf display if i click save now we can see my google entities tracked and home assistant all right so let's try something all right i can't tell my google to play anything copyrighted so literally the only thing i've come up with is to tell it to play white noise but let's give that a shot google play white noise now we can see in home assistant it's actually detecting that bedroom speaker is playing white noise and i can even control the volume i can pause it resume and even clear out that media from bedroom speaker that's pretty cool and when you think about the fact that you can tie this into automations you can have your bedroom speaker say something or do something think about it this way every action that we perform on an entity through the ui can be automatically scripted to occur without us using the ui let me try clicking on bedroom speaker there's a field at the bottom that says text-to-speech so let's try it [Music] hello youtube wow that's kind of weird but pretty cool because based off of what i just said earlier anything i can do through the ui i can automate so i could have my speaker say something based on a certain event like me arriving home i could have it say welcome grayson welcome grayson that's pretty awesome going back to the configuration tab real quick you can see also devices tells you which devices are being managed by home assistant which were set up through the integrations tab or manually going back we can see entities which is a prettier list of all the entities registered in home assistant kind of like how we saw earlier under developer tools if we go to areas we can see the different areas that have been set up as well as the amount of devices under them we go to automations we can actually go ahead and start setting up our automations there's also scenes which let you manage multiple devices at once with one click for instance if you have a bunch of different smart lights that you want to set to different colors you can create a scene based off of the colors that you want your lights to be set to or automate that scene to activate for all of your lights to switch to those colors there's also scripts which are basically sequence of events that you want to occur for instance if i want a script that's like shut down the house i can have it turn off the lights lock the door and turn off the air conditioning you can also manage the persons to be tracked and home assistant and you can link a person to an actual user account within home assistant there's also zones that we set up earlier and then there's the user accounts and home assistant so if you wanted to make an account for somebody else in your household you could click the plus button create their account for them and set the password going back there's the general page which is basically how we set up home assistant at the beginning server controls which lets you restart your server or stop the server altogether server being the computer or the virtual computer that we set up home assistant on logs which gives you a overview of any issues that have occurred with home assistant and then info which tells you the current version of home assistant the last thing to cover in the menu is the notifications clicking on that we can see that home assistant is telling me that it's discovered new devices if i click on the check it out button it takes us back to that integrations page that we already looked at and we can configure additional devices alright so that wraps up this video now you have a good understanding of the home assistant ui probably better than a lot of people that are currently using home assistant because we kind of went into everything just then it was a nice overview and feel free to explore it even more there were a couple pages i glossed over just because i wanted to keep the video at a reasonable length but i did hit what i felt were all the key points in the next video i'm going to be focusing on how to get home assistant accessible remotely so that we can get our smartphones connected to it once our smartphones are connected to it we'll actually be able to send our location of our phone over to home assistant so that way we can base automations off of it but even if you don't want to send in your location it's nice to be able to access the home assistant user interface through your phone with all that being said we'll have understood what home assistant is how to navigate through it how to get it set up on our phones we know how to set up our existing smart home devices with it we'll have some data points that we can work with and then we can actually get cracking on some real automations i know you want to jump right into it but it's important that we get the foundation going make sure that it's solid before we go straight into it that being said if you're really ambitious and i already have some home automation videos out feel free to skip ahead i'm not going to stop you alright well thanks for watching and subscribe if you're interested in seeing more and i'll see you in the next one you

Channel: Grayson Adams

Views: 25,457

Keywords: hassio, affordable, easy, how-to, diy, home automations, samsung smartthings, apple HomeKit, raspberry pi, Grayson Adams, home assistant, home automation, user interface, ui, walkthrough, guide, how to

Id: Am8FEhBhe5Y

Length: 19min 12sec (1152 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 17 2020