The realities of Home Assistant after using it for months.

hey everyone and welcome to a new video on bite of geek today well i'm sharing five of my realities of home assistant the things i've come across as i've started back using home assistant as part of my smart home system so let's check him out [Music] so first up and i just want to say this video is not meant to be some kind of bashing video on home assistant i think home assistant is a fantastic uh system uh you know for beginners and advanced users alike uh you know yes there are some flaws in it uh you know but you know there are just as many if not plenty more fantastic features in it and obviously you know it's built by a community and all the developers behind it and you know you've just got to give them a round of applause for the amount of effort that they are putting into home assistant to to bring this basically free of charge for people first of all i guess this is my number one thing really home assistant the uh you know the barrier to entry on home assistant i think is really really low uh you know it can be quite high but you know you can put home assistant on you know a raspberry pi uh you can get it set up really really quickly you could go down the route that i have done and go and put it on an intel nook um you know it can be a little bit more complicated uh you could put it on an old pc that you've got lying around if you know you wanted to reuse that um you know it it doesn't need anything super fantastic to run uh you know you could stick it in a in a you know a virtual machine a docker container something like that you know so it's like it it's something which is available for everybody really i think is the the key message there and you know when once you've got it up and running which you know it's not a long process it's probably less than an hour to get going with it you know that kind of out of the box experience at the end of it you know if you've got your smart devices connected in your house all ready to go then home assistant will pretty much find um most of the standard smart devices and and give you a nice dashboard that you can use at the end of it and i think that's really really clever uh you know you think about how um you know a lot of smart devices you've got to do pairing and all that kind of stuff uh you know for a home assistant to come out and you know basically after an installation have a nice dashboard or bit basic and but it is functional you know you can control your devices with it i think you know that makes it just such a good starting point for people who want to play around with home assistant now this is really one of my frustrations with the home assistant and you know just taking that previous comment about the fact that you know you end up with this dashboard that you can start playing around with your devices and what happens if you want to kind of change that look and feel of the dashboard well you know for me the ui designer um you know the dashboard designer really is is probably one of the weak points in home assistant you know i've got this weather card here that i'm trying to move around and you know i know the guys the developers aren't concentrating and focusing on this area the system at the moment and there are other options you know there's things like dwayne's dashboard that you can install which will um you know give you something a little bit uh a little bit prettier as it were but certainly you know it's just you know you click on these up and down arrows and cards sometimes go where you want them to go and sometimes don't um you know as a as a user interface for it for a an end user to use and this is the way that home assistant are wanting users to go you know they're driving more and more of the configuration and and control through front end side of things i think the actual dashboard editing really does need a bit of an overhaul you know some way to be able to drag and drop things around would be obviously the ideal perfect scenario so once you've got things set up and you start playing around with your dashboard and you start playing around with your devices and you're adding in those those additional things and you're playing around with the plugins and add-ons and all that kind of stuff you know you very very quickly find yourself being thrown into the depths of the home assistant forums to go searching and hunting for information you know you you follow things down a trail only to find that actually you know that was something from two years ago and unfortunately now it's not really the supported way of doing things and you you really need to be able to understand how to refactor that and use it the correct way um you know you find yourself on reddit you find yourself on people's personal blogs desperately searching for that information inevitably you will find it but it's just something that isn't quick you know you you can spend hours if not days sometimes trying to find a way of being able to do something and yeah i think it's it's one of those things that you know the the community is great they will try and help people a lot so you know i've seen various videos where people talk about the home assistant um kind of like community on on the forums and they can be a little bit challenging sometimes but that's because you know people probably just rock up to the forums and just you know i've not really you know copied and pasted some yaml from from somebody's website i can't get it working and i'm not prepared to do a little bit of research myself um you know and that's what frustrates people but you know you do find that you will spend an awful lot of time searching through these forums and you know this is how you get the best out of home assistant i suppose uh you know in your devices that you're connecting to home assistant but i think it is something you very much need to be prepared uh for spending part of your life doing that from this day forward as you've got your home assistant installation up and running so i mentioned a little earlier about how the home assistant developers were kind of pushing stuff now towards the user interface side of things for people to be able to edit and control things via that that's all well and good and it works up to a certain point but before too long you are going to find yourself uh talking to people about yaml and python and things like that um you know so you know you will be separating out all these or your configurations into yaml files and setting up automations and uh you know your sensors and your templates all those kinds of things yeah it would be a whole different thing that you know really did seem relatively straightforward on a user interface and now you need to deal with the ammo files and you need to be able to deal with yaml files and the special indentation that those yaml files require that you have in order to have a valid configuration you know you will be validating your config and restarting home assistant in order to test all these things out and again you know this is where the you know the barrier for entry on this for me i think you know it starts off really really low but then ramps up relatively quickly you know you this is where you you know you're trawling through the forums and reddit and things like that and you end up creating a lot of these things the ammo files are exceptionally powerful you can do an awful lot with them you know the separation is fantastic um but you know it really is uh you know one of the realities of home assistant is that inevitably you will end up pretty much moving everything to yourself over to yaml files and finally my fifth reality of home assistant i'm sure there's an awful lot more uh you know drop them down below in the comments if you've got any more realities of home assistant but for me i think you know and i've touched on this a little bit in the other ones it really will consume your life hours will just disappear whilst you are sat at your computer as you are trying things out typing in yaml you know you buy more smart devices you want to get them hooked up you want to create these special automations and you know you will spend an awful lot of time doing that you know if you're if you're married you've got a partner or whatever they're going to get extremely frustrated that you know you're not spending time with them the family or whatever but ultimately off the back of this you should end up with a very very nice well defined and configured smart home system running under home assistant so there you go guys those are my five realities of home assistant let me know your thoughts down below in the comments obviously meant to be a little bit of a a jokey video and you know some serious things in there but um yeah love to know your thoughts you know some of the challenges you faced with home system drop them down below in the comments if you've enjoyed this video then hit the like button and subscribe to the channel but as always thanks for watching and i'll see you in the next video bye for now [Music] you

Channel: Byte of Geek

Views: 21,105

Keywords: home assistant, home assistant guide, home automation, smart home, raspberry pi, home assistant getting started, home assistant best practices, home assistant how to, home assistant mistakes, beginners guide, smart home 2022, home automation system, home assistant hardware, home assistant tutorial, home assistant raspberry pi, home assistant realities, home assistant start over, home assistant gotchas, home assistant bad points

Id: RevpNnVWHlY

Length: 9min 42sec (582 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 31 2022