Home Assistant: Take Control of Your Smart Home (and Your Privacy!)
Home Assistant: Take Control of Your Smart Home (and Your Privacy!)
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Chapters
00:00 Why Home Assistant
00:55 Installing Home Assistant
01:38 More Home Assistant Resources & Channels
03:12 Zigbee, Zwave, and WIFi
06:30 How I am using Home Assistant
07:04 iphone and Android support
07:47 Home Assistant Intergrations
10:30 Building Automation
12:18 Managing the Dashboard
14:40 Better Smart Switch Choices
16:03 Automation With Zigbee Buttons
16:48 Voice Integration
The WiFi issue.. LOL all of the U7 Ubiquiti users right now finding all of their 2.4Ghz IoT devices aren’t working well.. Now that is probably a Ubiquiti issue but something you avoid by using Zigbee and Zwave.
It sucks that Ecobee has closed their API so any new customers aren’t able to generate API keys to use with HA.
Anyone know how to adjust the polling for the zwave? I have the same USB dongle and since migrating to zwave js my thermostat does not update regularly like it used to on the old zwave integration.
I really like that this is moving in the integration direction. I am hoping that soon the entirety of the smart home setup will be simpler and more easily working together without all of the work and thought that is currently involved. I think those of us with a good number of smart home devices do somewhat enjoy the setting up and the configuring of everything, but I imagine a good percentage of the population just wants it to be there to use.
Hello and happy new year 2025 I really like video that talks about unraid in France we don’t have many youtubers who talk about this operating system. can you translate your videos into French it would allow me to progress faster thank you very much.
Challenge: This is were Linux Sucks and No Internet Access
VM on ESXI host
USB Sound Card
Distributed sound and Mic in the House
Automation,Door Opens and Plays a Sound file or TTS.
And not VLC —— Tenet.
Purely out the sound card.
End of Line
Hey! Fantastic to see that you use Met. A fantastic Norwegian weather service (Whose frontend/website is yr.no) which is used all over the world, and extremely popular in Africa as well of all places. Super what a few tax buckaroos can get you.
Does Alexa etc still send data to AWS etc whilst being part of a home assistant setup? Or does no data leave your network at all if you use home assistant?
I really appreciate this channel! I was curious about home assistant and here you are publishing an informative video the day before.
i almost did a spittake when you said microcenter sponsored you — when i worked there 10 years ago they insisted they don’t do advertisements and only go by word of mouth
Sonoff has a bunch of WIFI devices that are NOT cloud dependent (Zigbee too), they are widely supported, they work in HA, they are nice quality now days and are very cheap.
Awesome video. Any chance you to make a video that goes over self hosting Home Assistant on a Pi and accessing it behind CGNAT? Basically a in between on your last 2 videos.
563 / 5 000
I have had homeassistant for many years and in the beginning I used 433mhz devices. Later switched to zwave. I can’t really agree with what you say about wifi. At least not in my case. Poor range with zwave and many missed on/off commands made me switch to wifi.
It works all the time and is much easier to add/remove devices. You can also control the devices locally in the webui of the device. All devices are in a NoT vlan that does not have an internet connection.
You also don’t need to have a zwave dongle connected to homeassistant.
for the automations node red is kinda mandatory, way more options than ha itself
Thanks for sharing your insights and how you use Home Assistance. Brilliant. Happy New Year, and have a great day
must be nice to have a MircoCenter 😉
FYI, you can set your notification to tell you which sensor has become moist too.
always great to hear an experts 2 cents…
Would love to see a follow-up video (if not already done), on how you’ve set up HA in your network, wrt your VLANs, firewall rules, etc. Do you keep your HA on a secure/trusted VLAN, with the connected devices on their own IoT VLAN, or do you keep everything on your IoT VLAN, and how have you set up your respective fw rules?
Does this feature any high availability features? I have two TrueNAS boxes. Would be nice to have it on one as primary, copying over to the backup incase the primary goes down.
Let the printer in!
Since you, of course, use a printer that is not cloud based it can through Home Assistant tell you the toner levels! 🙂
Do you keep you Home Assistant on your Lan, IoT, or DMZ network?
Your ecobee can probably be brought in via HomeKit which will allow it to work locally 😁
I wish we had Microcenter in the Tulsa Oklahoma area
I think for protocols thread could be a replacement for both, but there aren’t enough devices yet.
What do you think about thread
Just use Loxone
YO! Something is moist!
Your Mom has tripped the moisture sensor, again.
Great video! I’ve been using HA for several years now and like it so much that I donate to the project. If you put the time into tuning it for you needs, it’s about the best home automation platform you’re going to find.
My HA instance is a vm running on my Proxmox cluster. I have a zigbee and a zwave usb dongle attached to one host that is passed thru and it works perfectly fine for connecting to various devices. I don’t bother with any high availability features, being that only one host has the dongles, so I just manage downtime as needed. In return, backups and restores are super simple, being tied into my Proxmox backup server.
On the subject of presence detection, I use it to turn some of my inside Unifi cameras on or off (using their privacy mode feature), depending if my wife and/or myself are at home as well as for some alerts when doors or locks are opened when we’re not home.
I ran Home Assistant for a few years, but switched to Homey Pro about a year ago. A bit simpler, and yet almost the same. My usage may be atypical since my family exclusively uses the Apple Home app, so any “family oriented” automations runs in HomeKit, and devices are bridged across from the Homey Pro. The “serious” stuff, like monitoring my smart meter and reducing EV charging current when the main fuse max current is almost exhausted, that runs on the Homey Pro. And of course there are the hybrids, like controlling thermostats and heat pump. Automations mostly run on Homey, but since presence detection is an absolute pain, I tend to run presence aware automations in HomeKit.
I instantly recognized the Madison Heights Micro Center lol. I’m so glad we’ve got one in MI
do not use a raspberry pi. I hate people keep saying to use this system. I find a cheap intel machine is much better. Better yet a good previous generation PC with some beef to it.
Good video, it was pretty simple. A few tips I have though is, I’d recommend is customizing the actual device names instead of just on the dashboard card because it will sync everywhere and show up when you export to other smart homes like Apple Home or Google Home. Instead of copying the code you can click the 3 dots on the card before you edit it to copy the card or duplicate it. Finally, the new sections dashboard type is even more simple and easy to use for new users with drag and drop functionality, headers, etc. and it looks nicer.
Nice! Been using this for a year or two now–it’s great to see more people getting into it.
As always Tom you’re so much friendly and useful explaining complex concerts thanks 🙏!
I used to have a ton of ZigBee and z-wave stuff in my house. My house is a three floor building. As long as it works, it’s great, but when things start to behave weird, even when signal strength is good, well that where things turn ugly. It’s very difficult to diagnose and to actually find what is causing it can be a real pain. Also, pairing new devices with the mesh is also sometimes a huge pain because all vendors are free to have their take on how this should be done. And even after you’ve read the manual and you are doing exactly like what’s written, it still is frustrating with some vendors since things do not simply work all the time when setting stuff up. If you’ve ever played around with nodeon Octan remotes, you know what I am talking about.
So I’m back with Wifi with most of my devices. What Tom said is true though. It does consume more power. However, if I have poor wifi connectivity somewhere then that’s just not acceptable in my book and I would much rather fix that problem than trying to diagnose a weird meshing issue with either Zigbee or Z-wave. I want and I require good Wifi signal in all corners of my home.
I have not experienced that any of my Wifi smart devices have stopped working when upgrading the APs. I have Unifi APs, more specifically, U7-Pro and U6-Pro.
My goto Smart device maker these days is Shelly. They make excellent devices and I can’t recommend them enough. Most of their devices can also be flashed with other firmware if you prefer. They operate 100% local but you have the OPTION to add them to their cloud for free if you prefer that.
If my Internet goes down I still want to be able to control my stuff and I can do that with a local TCP/IP network like Wifi and Shelly.
Stay away from any smart home device maker who forces you to use their bs cloud stuff. Support vendors who give you the power to be in control.
Lastly, I recommend having a small and simple Zigbee network in your home a long side the Wifi devices. For sensors like Window sensors, Motion sensors and so on. I have three of the Shelly Motion Sensor 2 and they do work nicely but you need to charge them every 4-5 months and the battery in those is like 6000mAh. Kinda nuts. Larger battery than my cell phone. 😅
I have a few Shelly Magnet sensors for my walk-in closet. They are slow to send out signal to Home Assistant since they are usually in deep-sleep and need to reconnect to the Wifi in order to trigger an action. It’s not a long wait but those 3 seconds feels like 3 minutes standing there in the dark.
Lastly, make sure to always put all your smart home devices on a separate network from your internal network. Most vendors these days have simple ways of setting up an IOT network. Treat it like you don’t fully trust it and you’ll be fine. You will need to poke a hole for those devices to be allowed to communicate with HA over ColoT.
Awesome video – and thank you for including me in the list of creators 😉 really an honour
Aqara FP2 is a decent presence sensor I base my automations on. Not perfect, but decent.
Funny, I’ve been thinking about this but haven’t had the time to dig into it.
I value your take on this subject, and I hope to see you continue to visit it from time to time. You and I are on the same page about things like open source self hosted, etc. So I appreciate your perspective, specifically from a technically adept, not-just-consumerism angle.
As you’re going through presence detection, please let us know what you think about tracking Private BLE Devices and "Air Tag" beacons on Bermuda… Also please tell us what you think about the solution if you find it interesting for triggering automations and for dynamic dashboards… Been following you along since I started with home labing ahah Thanks
if you have a ring doorbell camera triggered by a person can it pop up a screen on the Apple TV or is that more complicated than some setup and event triggers?
Is home assistant made by goggle? The OS looks just like googles apps/ecosystem.
Hi Tom, great video, worth looking at the SMLight SLZB-06 ethernet POE hub iith built in web interface, instead of the USB dongle it an interesting alternative
Any home system that is local instead of cloud and with logins?
The WiFi IOT home automation devices are still very useful and relatively easy to modify and get them off the cloud. They can be the less expensive alternative to Zigbee. I don’t use Z-Wave and have never priced these items. The newer WiFi products use modules based around more secure Beken and RealTek chips. Modifying their firmware is done either by WiFi or external hardware attached to them.. What better way to really make a local IOT home automation system than by securing the devices yourself. The alternative firmware for these devices is integrated into the Home Assistant environment with the ESPHome system.
My goal is to get every HA device and the VM that Home Assistant runs from onto an isolated home network (LAN and WiFi) that will never see a WAN.
I dont think ive ever heard of micro center
Great video thank you for this! Looking forward to setting up my first Home Assistant system. I already set up a Truenas Scale system and am looking to move on and install Home Assistant Supervised on it as a VM. Although it’s hard to come by videos on this particular matter….
I would love a video on the Synology integration, webhooks, and camera AI. I utilize Syno Surveillance Station but it’s integrations with HA are minimal at this point. I’d also love to know how to better leverage the Syno SS advanced functions. Reolink cameras work great with HA as they are fully integratable AND affordable. I use them for motion/huan detections for outside lights. HA has by far the most integrations of any Smart Home system out there.
Been using Home Assistant for years, it’s come a long ways. Thanks for your point of view on it.
A couple quality of life things with the phone app notifications:
– Both iOS and Android have additional advanced settings you can pass (see the Home Assistant Docs website) to change things like the severity or notification channel. That’ll let you bypass do not disturb more granularly and make sure you don’t miss important notifications.
– I prefer to use notify groups to send notifications to, even for one device, so that I don’t have to go in and edit the notify entity on every automation if I upgrade my phone. You can set them up under "helpers".