What is Home Assistant Cloud? (Nabu Casa)

in this video i'm going to talk about home assistant cloud or dabukasa as it's sometimes known and why you should absolutely get it if you use home assistant i know i know i know what you're thinking alan you said home assistant keeps everything local we don't need the cloud anymore that's all true you don't need to get home assistant cloud but the benefits that you get from it are really awesome so stick around and i'll show you what's good about it what's bad about it and how to set it up so you can get the most out of it home automation guy start the show now firstly this is not a sponsored video nobody paid me to say any of the things that i'm going to say i genuinely love home assistant cloud and hopefully by the end of this video you'll understand why let's start with the basics what is nabukasa nabukasa is a company that was set up by the original founders of home assistant and they offer a subscription service which currently costs five dollars a month which gives you an easy way to remotely access your home assistant instance living in your home from anywhere that you have an internet connection either from a web browser or from the mobile phone app unlike many of the cloud home automation systems out there home assistant doesn't actually store any of your home automation information in the cloud this means that your security and privacy are maintained what home assistant cloud does is it simply passes information from your phone or your browser when you're outside your network through its cloud and then back into your home in an encrypted secure tunnel and back again this means that the information is never seen by the home assistant cloud servers it just passes the information backwards and forwards now you can still get access to your home assistant remotely from your phone or your web browser without using home assistant cloud it's just really clunky to set up first you'll need to open up a port and set up a port forward on your firewall and router that passes information from your internet connection through to your home assistant you'll then need to install an ssl certificate that encrypts all of the information between home assistant and your web browser or mobile phone however a lot of isps or home internet connections won't provide you with a static ip address which means that every time that your home internet ip changes you'll need to reconfigure everything to make sure that you can connect to the new address on top of this a lot of isps use something called cgnat which means that port forwards won't even work to begin with you can usually fix this by calling your isp and buying a static ip address but that can often cost more than five dollars a month which is what home assistant cloud costs of course there is absolutely nothing wrong with setting up a portfolio and managing all of this yourself and saving yourself five dollars a month there are actually instructions on how to do this on the home assistant website but remote access is not the only benefit you get from home assistant cloud you also get one-click integration to google or amazon's voice assistance this means that you can use your google home or amazon echo to control things inside home assistant you can get data from sensors turn on or off lights activate scenes and much much more for example if you're driving into your street and you have your android auto connected to your car you can ask your google assistant to open up the garage door as you pull into the driveway of course you don't need to use home assistant cloud to set up your google or amazon devices with home assistant you can also go to the home assistant website take a look at the instructions hope that you're incredibly technical follow 15 000 detailed steps and hope you didn't get any one of them wrong however if like me you've got better things to do and you want to control your home assistant from your google home or your amazon echo all you need to do is pay that five dollar a month subscription and do this pretty simple huh but wait there's more home assistant cloud also gives you the ability to use text-to-speech services on any media player entity that you have connected to home assistant this means that you can use an automation to say an actual message through one of the speakers that you have connected in your house when something happens for example in my home my doorbell chime is really far away from my bedroom which means i couldn't hear when i was lying in bed if someone rang the doorbell or not so i've created an automation using my google nest doorbell that is triggered when someone presses the button it says a message on my bedroom sonos using this text-to-speech function alerting me to the fact that someone's at the door and finally by paying the 5 a month subscription you're not only getting the benefits i just spoke about but you're also supporting the community which benefits all users of home assistant this is a really good thing and for me is the most important benefit of home assistant cloud of all home assistant is open source software which yes it means it's free to use but also means that there is a community of developers and volunteers out there who are giving up their personal time in order to improve and make enhancements to the platform nabucasa uses the proceeds of the home assistant cloud subscription to pay actual developers to work on home assistant as part of their job many open source projects often run out of steam after a while as the people who started them get busy with their day jobs or other areas of their lives and no longer can afford to invest the same amount of time in them this means that the applications that they created stop working as they're no longer supported by actually paying people to focus their time and energy on developing home assistant we can be sure that it will be secure stable and continually updated with regular releases for years to come the subscription also pays for the hosting of the community forums and the website itself which means it will remain ad free it also recently started paying for the development of esp home but that's a whole other story so you can see that paying this subscription not only benefits the users of home assistant cloud but the entire home automation community so i'm sure you can agree that it all sounds pretty great so what's the catch well it costs five us dollars a month it's currently not offered in any other currencies so if like me you're paying for it in pounds or maybe in australian dollars then you'll have to pay a different amount each month depending on the exchange rate some card providers will also charge you a credit card fee or a currency conversion fee for buying something in another currency but i personally think that it's definitely worth more than five dollars a month and i'm happy to pay for it for the benefits that i get and supporting the community itself if you're still on the fence about whether or not you want to sign up for home assistant cloud then they offer a 31 day free trial which gives you a full access to the entire thing for a month to see whether or not you get benefit from it so now that we've talked about why you should use it let's take a look at how you set it up the first thing you'll need to do is go to the naboo castle website and start your 31 day free trial of home assistant cloud when you click the sign up button you'll need to type in your email address choose a password and it will email you a code which you need to paste in here to verify that you actually own that email address you're now logged into the home assistant cloud web interface from here you can manage your plan essentially change your payment details connect to your remote user interface and also manage any notification settings from nabucasa about the emails that you may receive from them now that you've set up your trial and got your username and password it's time to go back to home assistant and we go into the configuration section to the home assistant cloud area at the top here you can type in that username and password and sign in to the home assistant cloud this will now connect your home assistant to its cloud instance and start provisioning your remote access point it can take up to five minutes or so to do this but once it's finished you'll be able to scroll down and see your home assistant remote access point here in the list i also recommend that you choose the automatically connect option which means that will automatically connect back to the cloud every time that your home assistant is restarted further down the page you can configure the text-to-speech voices or enable the voice assistance such as the amazon echo or the google assistant you'll need to sign in to your either amazon account or your google account to link your devices to your home assistant and to give it control to the various sensors and switches that you have available you just have to click the link log in and pair your devices together once you've got it set up i recommend that you enable state reporting this will then synchronize the states of your various entities whether a door is open or closed whether a light is on or off to those google or amazon servers this means that when you use the apps that come natively with those devices it will know if the lights on or off and it will be reflected in that app you can also use the manage entities area to choose which of the things in your home assistant are exposed to amazon or google you may not want everything that you've connected talking to google or talking to amazon you can click on one of these entities and choose whether or not it's exposed or not exposed the follow domain option allows you to specify a default for a type of entity for example you can automatically synchronize all lights to google but not media players and any new devices that you add of that type will follow the rules that are specified here in this manage domain section to set up your home assistant app to enable remote access from anywhere go to the hamburger menu and then the app configuration area now type in your home assistant cloud url into the home assistant url section or to increase performance and security you can configure the next two options as well firstly type in the name of your home wi-fi network ssid and then in the second option type in the internal url that you use to access your home assistant when you're in your home network what this will do is it will detect when you're connected to your home wi-fi and talk to home assistant using the internal url when you're at home if you're not connected to your home wifi it will use the external home assistant cloud url to connect via the internet this means that your traffic won't pass through home assistant cloud if you're at home because it doesn't need to hopefully you can now see why i love this service so much you get such a lot of value for such a small monthly payment of course you can go to the home assistant website and follow all of the manual configuration steps to get the same benefit that you do with home assistant cloud through remote access and connecting your voice assistants but the biggest benefit for me is really supporting the home assistant community supporting the development and continued improvement of the platform itself for everybody who uses it our support allows the developers of home assistant to release a new version every single month each time they do that i release a video showing you what's changed what's new and what you need to know i also release regular videos about how i'm using home assistant and smart devices to automate things around my house if you thought this video was useful click the thumbs up button to let me know and if you'd like to know when some of these other videos i've talked about are available click the subscribe button and together we can make your home smarter 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Channel: Home Automation Guy

Views: 3,427

Keywords: home assistant, home automation, home assistant cloud, nabu casa

Id: mA4nFJj2mxE

Length: 11min 29sec (689 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 22 2021