The ULTIMATE Smart Home Control Panel! (1 year later)

what's up smart homers i've had a wall mounted tablet for just over a year now and a lot of you have been asking me for an update on how it's going start [Music] in this video i'm going to go over some of the questions that you guys have asked me in the past few months and i'll give you some recommendations if you're looking to set one of these up there'll be chapters set up in the description so if you want to skip some of the stuff you already know you can go ahead and do that if you don't already know home assistant is my smart home platform of choice and for good reason because it has one of the best dashboard displays that i've ever seen like i said i've had this tablet for over a year now and about eight months ago i set up a second one in my basement for the second setup i actually used a newer version of the tablet than i did with my first one for each setup i used a fire hd 10 tablet a 3d printed mount a recessed electrical box a usb electrical outlet and a right angle usb charging cable the total cost for the setup ends up being between 160 us dollars and 200 something us dollars depending on if you can get a good deal on the tablet on prime day these tablets go on extreme sales and if you follow me on twitter you'll see me tweet out about them when they do go on sale since my last video i've made a few noteworthy changes that i should bring up as i mentioned with my first setup i used a 2019 version of the fire hd10 tablet but with my second tablet i actually used the 2021 version and there is a marked difference in performance where the 2019 version kind of stuttered and lagged a little bit when it was trying to load some browser pages the 2021 version was much smoother the addition of the fully kiosk integration and home assistant eliminates the need for creating sensors in yaml like i did in my previous video this makes the setup so much easier watching my last video back again i noticed that i mentioned that i was going to use my tablet as an echo device and replace the echo dot in my kitchen but that never happened and that's because the speakers on this device are pretty bad it ended up actually just interfering when i'd be talking to my echo dot so i ended up just turning off that feature completely on the tablet lastly you may recall that i made a video on how to smart charge the tablet using a smart usb outlet i still do this on one of my tablets and i still do think it will prolong the tablet's life based on my research but my plan was to do on one and not the other and then compare the battery life of the two tablets i honestly don't care at this point and am no longer planning to actually follow up and show if the battery life was better on one than the other as my smart home has matured i've migrated away from the 2 year smart life devices that i used when i first set up my smart home for the first tablet setup that smart outlet that i was using to charge the tablet was actually a 2 year smart outlet and if i was doing this again and i want to smart charge a tablet i definitely wouldn't use a 2d device since they're not as reliable as something that doesn't require the cloud i will say that this device has been pretty reliable though while it was a fun project smartifying the charging of the tablet i don't think i'll ever do it on my second tablet and i probably wouldn't add it on a third for those of you who didn't see my first video and want to know how i actually set this up and installed it or for those of you who complain there was enough footage of the actual setup and install i'm going to go ahead and show you how i set up and installed my second tablet it's actually not too bad to set up provided you know how to wire electrical outlets or you have an electrician that can help you first you got to choose where to place the tablet i chose high traffic areas one of my kitchen and one of my basement because that's where it could get the most use and where i could see the data i want displayed next i chose which tablet i wanted the best deal price-wise that i could find on a inch tablet was the fire hd 10. on top of that i found a video where someone showed how to use the fire tool kit to put the google play store and google play services on the device effectively making it a google android tablet this is a no-brainer for me and if i did another one i would still use a fire tablet next i had to choose a mount for the tablet now i've seen all different kinds of mounts some that mount to outlets but seemed kind of flimsy but the best ones i could find were ones that were 3d printed but since i didn't have a 3d printer set up at the time and my 3d printing bed now is still not big enough to print one of these easily i decided i would just pick one up there are plenty of options out there and there are ones you can buy from amazon or from etsy and while they're not the cheapest they've done the design work for you so you're kind of paying them back not only for the product itself but for that design that they've done there are a few different ones that work but the best one in my mind was the one i chose from motifs etc on etsy next i had to decide what app it would run technically i could have just used the home assisted app since this tablet was effectively an android tablet but i decided not to and to use the fully kiosk app because the fully kiosk browser app allows you to have remote control of the tablet itself and gives you access to things like the camera for a motion sensor or for a camera entity in home assistant the full kiosk app has a home assistant integration which saves you a ton of time when you compared what i did in my previous video with getting this thing added to home assistant and all these sensors showing up i decided to place my second tablet above an existing light switch so wiring the outlet for power would be a bit easier i decided on appropriate height and then used the recessed electrical box to trace out a rectangle on the wall then i carefully used a drywall saw to cut out the rectangle making sure not to cut through any wires in the wall while i did it with the power off of course i was able to run a new wire down to the electrical box below the tablet bringing power up to the recessed box after i put the existing electrical box with the new wires tied in back together i slid the new wire inside the recessed box and then inserted the box into the rectangular hole in the drywall the recessed box is an old work box and has little tabs that clamp it against the drywall holding it in place so you don't need to screw it or nail it to a stud it has a plate that goes on the front of it which is what the tablet mount will actually be attached to the tablet mount comes with two screws which go right through the mount and into the recessed box once the tablet mount was attached i wired in the usb outlet and put the cover on then i attached the little right angle usb-c charging cable the one that came with the mount and plugged into the tablet and then snapped the tablet in place the last stop was popping on the tablet mount's cover and the dashboard was ready to go after installing fully kiosk and configuring it the way you want and that's shown in my previous video you can use home assistant on it just like you would on a regular tablet with the home assistant app but you're actually going through the fully kiosk browser again if you need any instruction on how to configure fully kiosk my last video is still pretty up to date on how to do that alright next let's talk about what i use it for before we do that though i want to talk to you about the sponsor of today's video skillshare when i first started using home assistant i would get a ways into a project but then i'd run into a wall when there was a need to understand some basic programming languages and formats changes to home assistant have really reduced the need to understand programming languages like yaml and json but when getting into anything advanced a basic understanding would be a huge help skillshare has a wide variety of courses including a ton going over basic programming languages one of the courses that has really helped me out is a course called javascript objects and json data by jason myers this course really communicated clearly the basics of json formatting which has helped me quite a bit with some of my more ambitious home assistant projects as part of the sponsorship though the first 1000 people to click the link in the description will get a one month free trial of skillshare why not take a few classes and build up your core of knowledge when it comes to programming languages now back to the video now i've seen a lot of comments on reddit and other places proclaiming how a smart home dashboard wouldn't be useful and they have no need because their home is so automated that there's no need to control things manually and i do agree that a smart home should be mainly controlled by automations you shouldn't have to manually do anything however that's just not reality and these smart home dashboards aren't just for controlling your home but also for viewing important information about the status of your home i use this tablet for a ton of different things from something as simple as just checking the time all the way to viewing camera feeds and knowing if i have mail it's super cool because the screen stays off unless the camera senses motion or the microphone hears something and the screen turns on even though it's a screen on the wall since it's flush mounted and the screen's off it's not too distracting at all from the panel i have quick controls for all lights in the area access to cameras and thermostat controls i can see the status of all the exterior doors in the house opened and closed the garage doors and also sent announcements to echo speakers in the basement this is the last episode please come upstairs when it's over i have a mailbox card that shows me if i have mail and have a card for my vacuum cleaner controls as well i use swipe cards on this dashboard to allow me to access other controls and information super quickly but it doesn't need to be displayed all the time swiping the digital clock reveals the week's daily forecast swiping the lighting card reveals lighting and window covering controls for other areas of the house swiping the climate controls reveals temperature graphs for various rooms and swiping the security card reveals controls for security systems one of my favorite cards is my person card which i adapted from a post someone made on reddit i can't remember who now it shows a bitmoji image of me with a location icon and one quarter and my phone's battery percentage in the other tapping the card pulls up more information on the person entity when my amcrest 8410 doorbell button is pressed the camera feed is displayed on the tablet screen for a minute before it switched back to the main page i've actually added a smart lock to each of my exterior doors so lock control is something i'm planning on putting on there as well some of you have asked if my wife uses a tablet and yes she actually does she uses it frequently for things like announcing when dinner is ready using the preset announcement buttons time for supper or even typing in custom text-to-speech commands to our google or amazon speakers you should spend more time with your family the thing she uses it most for is actually the digital clock that's in the center of the dashboard i also use it as a motion sensor to detect motion in the kitchen and basement areas using the camera on the tablet and of course i can use the camera to check it what's going on in the area as well on the basement control panel i have a couple button cards that trigger the setup and shutdown of my projector that i've automated as well as some other things that i've already described if you want to see how i automated my projector setup i made a video about that as well when i installed this tablet the first time i really thought i was going to use it for lighting controls a bit more than actually do but since motion sensors strategically play smart buttons and automations control my lighting in the living areas of my house i really don't use it for controlling lighting that much as far as guest usage we try to keep our house pretty guest friendly by stopping a lot of automations when guests are over using an input boolean helper but there's really nothing that a guest would need to use our wall panel for besides maybe checking the time anything they could do on the wall panel we obviously have manual methods and since that's what they're probably used to that's what they'll probably do if i was going to do another one of these i'd probably either put it in the living room which is a high traffic area or the master bedroom because it's just kind of cool having controls right there anyway that's pretty much it for this video i hope i covered most of the questions that you guys had in the past few months and if i missed them i'm sorry leave a comment and i'll try to answer it there i also hope i showed that these tablets aren't just a gimmick and actually super useful and if you really love data and understanding what's going on with your house having data displayed in a beautiful way using home assistant is a great way to do it if you'd like to help out the channel go ahead and hit the subscribe button and if you want to help out monetarily you can either give me a one-time thanks donation or you could become a member don't forget to like the video if you want to see more like this one and as always thanks for watching see ya [Music] hey honey what time did you get to sleep last night press start you

Channel: Make It Work

Views: 69,001

Keywords: smart home, tech, home assistant, automation, diy, review, control, device, sensor, tablet, fire, hd, fire hd 10, amazon, alexa, speaker, smart speaker, dashboard, display, control panel, wall panel, fully kiosk, fk, wallpanel

Id: cdZO4NFFWDk

Length: 13min 43sec (823 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 12 2022