Home Assistant Essentials – Automate Your Home Easily

1. 1.What is home assistant: Home assistant is an open source home automatization platform that allows you to control smart devices and automate routines in your home. It runs locally on your own hardware like Raspberry Pie, meaning your data stays private and you don't rely on Cloud services. It supports thousands of smart home products from lights and switches to thermostats, sensors, and even mediapliers, regardless of their manufacture, you can monitor devices, control them through a dashboard, mobile app, or voice assistants, and create powerful automatizations using a simple am configuration or visual editor. Home assistant is available on wide range of devices, making it easy to access and control through Smart Home from anywhere. You can use it directly in a web browser on your computer whenever it's a Windows PC, Mac or Linux machine. Just type in the local IP address or domain name of your home assistant server, and the interface will load. It's also fully accessible on mobile devices. There are official home assistant apps available for both Android and IOS. These apps offer a smooth and responsible experience giving you access to your dashboard, notification, and device control right from your phone or tablet. You can also use features like location tracking, voice command, and push notifications. Tablets work great with home assistant too. Many users mount tablets on their walls and use them as smart home control panels. The interface adapts well to different screen size, so it looks good on smartphones, as well as large tablets and desktop monitors. In short, home assistant is flexible and accessible wherever you are on your desktop computer at work, on your phone while you are on the go, or on tablet in your kitchen. You are always in control of your home. Home Assistant works with ecosystem from Amazon, Apple, Google, and Smart fins, but independent of them, it supports all types of wireless communication protocols used by smartphone devices, including Internet, Wi Fi, Bluetooth Zigbe, Z Wave, thread, and Matter. Home assistant is popular among tech enthusiasts because it's highly customizable and flexible. Whenever you are looking to set up basic SmartHme system or build complex automatization scenarios, Home assistant offers the tools to make it happen. 2. 2.Home assistant installation methods: Home assistant can be installed in several different ways depending on your hardware, needs, and technical experience. Here is a comprehensive list of all the main installation types. Home assistant in a virtual machine, home assistant green, home assistant operating system, on a raspberry pie, home assistant supervised, home assistant container, home assistant COR. In next session, I will guide you step by step through the process of installing assistant in a virtual machine. This method is completely free and doesn't require any special hardware which makes it a great way to test out the platform and explore its features without any initial investment. As you've had a chance to try it and see how it works, you can decide if it's the right solution for you. If you enjoy using it and want to make it a permanent part of your smart home setup, you can later purchase a device like Raspberry Pie or the official home assistant green to run it on dedicated hardware. Home assistant in a virtual machine, you install the home assistant operating system inside a virtual machine, best for users who want to run home assistant alongside other system on a one powerful machine. Home assistant green type, plug and play hardware, description, and official device from Nabukasa designed for easy setup and use. No technical knowledge needed. Best for beginners who want to easy start. Home assistant operating system, the recommended installation method, you flash a dedicated operating system onto a device like Raspberry Pie. Best for most users who want the full home assistant experience, including addons and supervisor. Home assistant supervised on Debian gives you the same features as home assistant operating system, but installed on a manually managed debian system. Best for advanced user who want control over the host operating system, but still wants supervisor and addons. Home assistant container, Docker, you run only the core home assistant application inside Docker, no supervisor or add ons. Best for users who already use Docker and want a lightweight setup. Home assistant Core manual installation in Python. You manually install home assistant C in a Python environmental, best for advanced Linux user and developers who want full control and minimal dependencies. 3. 3.Installing HA on Virtual machine: Installing home assistant on a Virtual machine. There are five quick steps to install home assistant on a Virtual machines. Step one, download Virtual Box. First, go to the Virtual Box website and download the installer that matches your operating system. Virtual Box is free and easy to install. Second, download the home assistant VM image. Visit the home assistant installation page for Windows. There, download the VDI file. This is the virtual disk image. We use the run home assistant in the VM. Step three, create a new Virtual machine in Virtual box. Step four, start the Virtual machine. Once all settings are configured, start the VM. Home assistant operating system will put up inside the Virtual machine. Step five, access home assistant for your browser. After the VM boots, open your browser. Navigate to the address shown in the VM console. Usually it's home assistant Local 81 to three. You will see the home assistant setup screen where you can configure your system. That's the basic process to get home assistant running on a virtual machine. This method is a great way to test home assistant before installing it on dedicated hardware like raspberry pie or home assistant green. Let's open the virtual machine and add the image. Put the name, change the type to Linux. Then enable a P and select the image. Press finish. Then you need to change the network settings. Go to settings, Network, and change to bridged and press Okay. Now you can start the virtual machine. Now, when the address is visible, the setup is completed. 4. 4.Home Assistant first view - dashboard: Let's open a web browser and put the IP address here. It's shown here. You can type homeasistm dot local 8123, or you can type the IP address. Let's create my Smart Home. Choose a name and password. Okay, here is the dashboard. Let's talk about the dashboard. Dashboard provides a customizable interface where users can view and control all the smart home devices in one place. Users can design the dashboard to fit their preferences using cards, grids, or tabs. Each dashboard can have multiple views tailored for specific needs such as security, lighting or energy monitoring. Home assistant includes many types of cards like TTS card for listing sensor and switching, button card for triggering actions, gauge card for showing values like temperature or battery level, graph card for visualizing historical data. Dashboards can be customized per user with different access level useful for households where some users need full control and others on limited access. The dashboard is accessible through the web browser or mobile device, and it automatically adapts to the different screen size. Dashboards are not just for display. They can include interactive elements that trigger automations, scripts, or scenes directly. 5. 5.Describing Settings Card: Let's talk about the setting stp. The first setting you can configure is home assistant Cloud. You can configure and manage the Nabukasa cloud integration, which provides easy, secure access to your home assistant instance and smart home devices from anywhere without needed a complex network setup. What is a home assistant Cloud? Home assistant Cloud is a subscription service offered by N Abucasa the company that supports home assistant development. It gives user enhanced features like remote access to home assistant from anywhere, Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant integration without needed manual configuration, secure and encrypted connection without opening ports in your router. Voice control over devices through supported assistance. Features you can manage in this. Remote access, voice assistant integration, account info, the Bac Ts, privacy and security. The next step is devices and services. It's the central place where you can manage integration and connected devices in home assistant. Key section in this tap, integrations. So all configure integration like MQQTT, Zigbe, Phillips, H, Toya, et cetera. You can add new integration by clicking at Integration button. You can configure or remove existing one and see how many devices and each integration provides. Devices, list all physical or virtual devices discover or added to home assistant. For example, Smart bulbs, sensor, thermostats, switches, media plier. You can click on a device to view its details, rename it, assign it to the area entities. Every device can have one or more entities like sensor temperature switch lamp. You can enable or disable entities, rename them, or change their category or assign them to a device. Helpers. If you create helpers like Input Boolean, you will find them here too. Automations and sins. Automation and sins. It's where you can configure how your smart home reacts automatically to events or where you define preset states for devices. It includes two man features automations. Automations allow you to create logic that tells home assistant what to do when certain conditions are met. Trigger, where starts the automatization, condition, and the action. So what happens when the automatization runs? For example, turn on a light, send a notification. Example, when you arrive home after sunset, they turn on Halloway light. Since. Since let you define a set of device states and apply them to advance. You can include lights, switches, thermostats, media appliers, and more. Useful for creating modes or routines like moving night or good morning. For example, a scene called relax could dim the lights to 30%, set the thermostat to 22 degrees, and play soft music. Areas, labels, and zones. This section helps you organize and manage your smart home devices by location, grouping, and geolocation. Areas. Areas represent physical location or rooms in your home, like living room, kitchen, bedroom, garage. Devices assigned to areas are easier to manage, especially when using voice assistants or dashboards. For example, if you assign a smart light to the living room area, you can say turn off the living room lights. Labels. Labels are custom tags. You can use to group devices across different areas. Unlike areas, which are based on location, labels are flexible. You can create labels like old selling lights, security devices, energy monitoring. Devices can have multiple labels. For example, a motion sensor in the kitchen might be part of the kitchen area and also tagged with a security devices label. Zones. In home assistance, zones are used to define geographical areas, so locations on a map that are meaningful to you, such as home, work, school, gym, or any other place you care about. These zones enable location based automatization presents detection and contextual awareness of where people or devices are. So you can set your zone to home. It's the place where you live. Also, you can create zone work, it's the place where you work. And when you enter zone work, your vacuum cleaner can start action in your home. Addons. Addons in home assistant lets you install and manage additional software components that run alongside home assistant to expand its functionality. What are addons? Addons are like mini applications or services that integrate directly with home assistant. They run in isolated environmentals and often provide tools, integrations or advanced features. Example of popular addons, file Editor, Edit configuration files directly from the web user interface. Samba share gives you access to your configuration files over your local network, ESP Home, flash and manage ESP based devices easily, Maria DB or InfluxDB, used for advanced data logging and visualization. What you can do in the browse addon stab, you can browse the available dons in the Aaron store. Here is the store. You can install and install tons, start and stop them. If you log, configure tons individually, enable out to restart and watchdog. Dashboards. The dashboard tap in home assistant allows you to create, customize and manage visual interfaces to control and monitor your smart home. These are the screens you see when you open home assistant in a browser or mobile app. Dashboards are collection of cards and views that shows the current state of your smart home. They can include things like light switches, sensor readings, for example, temperature, humidity, power usage, media plier controls, cameras, graphs, buttons, sliders, and more. You can create multiple dashboards, for example, one for each family member, one for mobile use, one for a wallet tablet, one for advanced user, and one for guests. Voice assistance. The voice assistance tap in home assistance allow you to configure and manage built in or connected voice assistance enabling you to control your smart home with spoken commands. This feature supports both local voice assistance and cloud connected assistance like Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa. What you can do in the voice assistant tab, you can set up local voice assistance or connect to the Cloud assistance. You can integrate with Google Assistance and Amazon Alexa. These require home assistant Cloud NabucaaE. Tag. The tag tap in home assistant lets you create a manage NFC tags or Custom QR codes that can be used to trigger automatization when scanned. It's a powerful way to physically interact with the Smart Home using phones or other tag readers. For example, you can scan an NFC tag near your front door to turn on the hallway lights. Place a tag in your car to start a living home routine. Stick a tag on your nightstand to turn off all the lights at night. People. The People tap in home assistant lets you manage and link users with their device trackers so you can monitor who is home away or at a specific location. It's useful for presence detection, automatization, and creating a more personalized smartcm experience. What are people? A person in home assistant is a profile that connect a user with one or more device tracker like phones, Wi Fi, etcetera. This allows home assistant to track the person's location and status. You can add new person, link device, trackpads, associate with a user account, edit or delete people. Use cases, create automatization like turn on lights when Alice gets home. Send a notification when Bob leaves work. Arm the alarm when everyone is away. Person versus user. A person is mainly for location tracking. A user is someone who can log into home assistant. You can link a person to a user, but it's not required. System. The system tab in home assistant gives you access to tools and settings related to the overall health performance, and configuration of your home assistant instance. It's mainly used for monitoring, troubleshooting, and performing maintenance task. The But tab in home assistant provides detailed information about your home assistant installation. It's a quick place to check erion details, system info, and important links related to your setup. Here is the most important information. 6. 6.Describing Profile Card: Now let's talk about the profile tap. It's where you can manage and personal user settings and preferences. It's linked to your logged in account and lets you customize how home assistant behaves just for you. What you can do here. You can change your language adjust date and time format. Choose how dates, times, and number are displayed. If it should be 24 hours clock or 12 hours clock. You can set your preferred time zone. You can change your name and email and set a personal them appears preferences, like dark mode or light mode. 7. 7.Create first entity: Even when you have no devices, you can do really nice things in home assistant. For sure you've got laptop or PC. You can measure how many times each day it's turned on. So let's do that. Go to the settings, devices and services and click at Integration. Now, search for the pink. Here, you can type the IP address of your machine or the host name. The better way is to put the host name. To find the host name of your machine, press Windows and R on the keyboard and put CMD here. Here, just type host name. Here is the host name. You can paste it here and press Submit. Perfect. You can choose what area you want to assign, but leave it blank. You can change the device name. Let's call it MPC and press finish. Okay, as you can see here, you got one device and five entities. You can see it's connected, so it's turned on. Also, you can check the time, the average, maximum or minimum. But to do that, you need to enable this entity. Go to the settings. And change it to enable and press update. Okay. Perfect. Now, we need to wait a little, but the setting entity, it's done. Okay, right now, as you can see, it shows the status of the computer and also it shows the average time for the pink. Please remember that you are running the home assistant on the virtual machine. So each time you turn on RPC, you need to start the virtual machine to measure the time for how long your PC is turned on. Okay, but right now we have only the status of UPC if it's turn on or turn off. We need to add helpers to measure the time, how long it's turn on. So what are helpers? Helpers in home assistance are special tools that let you create custom inputs and controls to interact with your smart home setup without writing a complex code. And what helpers can do. They allows you to create user friendly input controls like switches, sliders, boxes, selectors, and more. They store temporary or user defined values that can be used in automizations, scripts, and templates. A, they help customize and control automatizations by letting users change settings dynamically with the home assistant UI. There are multiple helpers like input bullion. They are good for the switching on off, input number, input select, counter and timer, et cetera. Let's go to the history stats. Let's call it MPC turn on time. We need to select an entity. That's the entity we created before. MPC. And the state is on, and the type is time. Now, we need to put the formula when should be the start and when should be the end. So in start, what does formula does? We replace the today hour, today minute, and today seconds to zero. And for the end, it should be just now. So because we replace starting hours to zero and end to now, it will count the total time. How long is our PC two non today? Let's press Submit. You can assign it to Area, but you can leave it as it is. Right now, when you click on this MPC turn on time, it shows you for how long it's turned on. Also, you can go to the overview, and as you can see here, it shows that PC is connected, so it's turned on the time for how long PC is turned on. 8. 8.Create a second entity weather - from HA Services: Okay, let's add another entity from Home assistant store that will show the weather in our location. To do that, go to the settings, devices and services and click at Integration. Search for this integration and click it. Now, you need to type name and latitude and longitude and press submit. Press skip and finish. Perfect. Right now, you can click the NTT and click on the home. So as you can see, here is the forecast for the weather. Also, when you go to the overview, you see the forecast and you can click on it, and all details will be shown here. 9. 9.Places from where you can download extensions - Home assistant store and HACS: Let's talk about the home assistant extensions. There are two main sources, official home assistant integrations. You got over 2,500 officially supported integrations. They are tested and supported by home assistant team. They are stable and safe, frequently updated, and no extra setup is required. Second source is home assistant community store. The extends home assistant features far beyond the built in capabilities. It's easy installation update process and huge active developer community. 10. 10.How to install HACS: The easiest way to download Home assistant community store is to download add on. I already show you how to do that. Click this link and press Open Link button. Now press the ad. Now, press the Install button. Now, press the start button and go to settings under Start Home assistant. After Home assistant restarts, go to the settings, devices and services at Integration and search for Home assistant community store, Mark checkboxes, and you need to perform activation on the GitHub account. Copy this one, go to the link. And press authorize. You can press keep and finish. As you can see, the Home assistant community store is shown here. 11. 11.Measure How long you are at home through HACS: Okay, now let's measure how long you are at home. The easiest way to do that is to measure for how long your mobile phone is connected to your Wi Fi network. So go to the settings, devices and services, pink. And as you remember, here is your laptop, here is your computer. Let's add a new entry and type the IP of your mobile phone. Press submit. Okay, we can name it my phone. Perfect. And as you remember, in previous slides, we create helpers that measure how long the PCs turn on. We can do the same for the mobile phone, but we can use hug for that. Let's download measure it. As you can see, it can measure all kinds of things happening in home assistant. Let's download it. Perfect. And as you can see here now in the notification, it says that a restart is required. So go to the developer tools and the Restart home assistant. Okay, now, when the home assistant is restarted, we can go to the devices and services and add integration. Let's type measure it. Perfect. We want to measure the time. Let's call it my phone on time. And here's the condition template. Read the formoi and I will describe it later what it does. Spress We need to change also the time. From what time to what time it will measure and also how often it should be restarted. So right now, it said today, you can change it to every hour, week, month, et cetera. But the days okay. Also is that the unit of measurement is second. Press next and submit and finish. As you can see, here is the integration. Right now, it shows that my phone is connected for 7 seconds. It will be updating every few seconds. But go to the developer tours and in the template, let's type the formua. You can check formulas here. So what we are checking, we are checking if our phone is in state. And if this condition is met, it's set as true, and you can see here. So it's state binary sensor, my phone set to on, it shows the true. How can I know that it's on? You can also go to the states and search for the entity. And as you can see here, here is the binary sensor, my phone, and right now it's on. So I know when this state is on, the mobile phone is connected to Wi Fi network. So it means I'm in home. Let's go to the overview. And as you can see here, my phone on time, it shows 67 seconds, and it will be restarted every 24 hours. 12. 12.Editing dashboard - basics: Okay, we've got a few sensor. Let's edit the dashboard. Let's press the dit dashboard button. And click Take Control and press the Take Control button. Right now, you run the Edit mode and you can change your dashboard. Just press Add card, and as you can see, here is the list of available cards in home assistant. You can add the clock, for example, let's say current time you can change the clock size, and it will be visible here. You can also change, for example, you can also show, for example, the average time for pink. Here is a nice gauge. You can use that. Let's say minimum is zero, maximum is ten milliseconds or 12, ten milliseconds and press Save. As you can see here, it shows the average pink. Also you can add a badge, so it will be small icon. Let's search by entity. MPC trip time average and press Continue at two dashboards. As you can see here now, here is the pink. Also here is the pink. You can also add another card. It's the sensor card. Let's find the MPC time average and press Save. Right now you can also see the pink as a chart. I will talk about the dashboards later when we will have more sensors. 13. 13.HACS - weather: Okay, now let's add something that will show the forecast temperature in home assistant. It's really nice add on in Home assistant community store. Let's search for weather Chart card. Perfect. And here is how it looks like. Let's press down button and download this weather chart card. And we need to reload. Right now, go to overview, and that's another view. Let's call it weather. You can change the number of sections to two. And here is our view. Let's add this new card. At the bottom, there is a custom cards. Let's press it. As you can see, it automatically search for the weather entity and we can change the forecast type to hourly forecast. Let's leave it to the daily. Also we can change chart style. It will change those boxes. As you can see right now, it's without boxes with the chart style one with boxes. Also we can change few settings so we can show the dew point. We can show when the plot was updated, we can use 12 hour format. We can show the current time. So as you can see, it's change going to change to 12 hour format. We can turn on the second sets. Everything can be align. Also, we can show the forecasts and we can change the units and alternative entities. So the alternative entities, it's for the for the humidity, right now, it shows based on the data from where it gets. But if you get the humidity sensor, we can choose our own humidity sensor. And that's all. We can finish changing that. And as you can see, it's so really nice view in our home assistant. 14. 14.Create Sensor with actual temp outside: Okay, so we've got the section created, but we don't have sensor that will show the actual temperature outside. I always show you how to create a helper that will show actual temperature outside. So let's go to the settings, devices and services, and helpers. Here, we need to create a helper, and the helper type should be a template. And template sensor. We can fulfill the name temp outside in the state template. We need to put this formula. So it takes the attribute temperature from the weather forecast home. We can fulfill the measurement is units and it will be the degrees Celsius degrees, and we can leave it rest as it is. Let's play submit. Perfect. Right now, when we press the temperature outside, you show the temperature that is outside our home. So let's talk more about the state template. So how I knew that I should fulfill it like this. Let's copy it and I will show you, let's go to the developer tools. I'll talk about the developer tools later. But let's go to the states, and let's search for the weather. So here is the weather forecast home. And the attributes of the weather forecast home are listed here. So we know the temperature, we know the dew point, we know the wind speed, et cetera. So if you want to take the specific attribute of the entity weather forecast home, we can pull out the temperature. And if we go to the template, we can type whenever we want here. But if we paste this formula here, as you can see, we can see the temperature. 14.4. Let's go back to the states. Also, we can take another value. So for example, we can take wind speed. We go to the template, and if you change the temperature to wind speed, as you can see, it's 10.4. So from this entity, weather forecast home, we can take some attributes. Doesn't work with every entity, as you can see here. Let's go and search for the entity MPC maybe. It doesn't have the attributes. Only a few attributes are listed here. So not every entity has attributes, but whether has, and we can take the temperature, for example, from this entity. So right now, you can go to the overview, go to the weather, and we can add another entity. Let's add it, or maybe let's add a badge. And here we can search by entity. Let's search for the outside temperature, continue and add to dashboard. So we can see there the temperature outside here. It's also visible here, but we can see here and we can see how it's changing. 15. 15.Tuya integration: Let's talk now about the Tuya. Tuya is a cloud based platform and ecosystem that powers a wide range of smart home devices from many manufacturers, many budget friendly smart devices use Tuya Fmware even if they are branded differently. In Home assistant, Toya integration allows users to connect and control their Tuya Power devices. And this can be done in two ways. Official Toya integration, it's cloud based integration uses Tuya or Smartlif account and it requires linking to your Tuya platform project. It's dependent on the Internet and Toya Cloud servers. It's very easy to set up. The second integration is the local Toya, it works locally. It communicates directly with devices over your local network, and it's faster and more private and it's not relevant on the cloud from Toya, it requires extracting local keys from devices. So it's not very easy, but it can be done as well. Ta supports several communication protocols that allow smart devices to connect and communicate within a smart home environment. I will describe the two most common communication protocols. Wi Fi. It's the most common and devices are connected directly to your home Wi Fi network and communicate with the Ta Cloud. And no hub is required. And it's easy to set up and no extra hardware is needed. The second one is ZG B. It's a low power mesh capable protocol, IDI for battery power at, and responsive smart devices, but it requires a ZigbGateway, it requires hub that connects to your outer, and those devices talk to the gateway which relays messages to the cloud of home assistant. It's very energy efficient and it works well for large setups. There are multiple devices that use to you, smart bulbs, lead light strips, selling lights, smart switches and dimers, smart plugs, power strips, smart thermostats, fan heaters, air conditioners, door or window contact sensor, smoke and gas detectors, glass break detectors, smart locks, remote controls, soil moisture sensor, weather stations, smart pet feeders, washing machine, robot vacuums, coffee makers, et cetera. Okay, let's now add the Toya integration. Go to the settings, devices and services, and here is the Toya integration. It will be based on the Ta Cloud services. So it's not to a local, it's Toya, and press Add. Right now, I need to fulfill my user code. And here I need to do the authorization. I need to turn on my application that I've got on my phone and I need to scan the QR code. Perfect. QR code is scan, and it finds few devices. Let's skip and finish. And as you can see, it found six devices and 23 entities. I've got the device called Nasco. Let's change the name. Also, let's change the name. And here you can see there are few, free disable entities. Let's turn them on. Perfect. And let's wait awhile. So this is the plug that can measure the power current and the voltage. And also, I can turn it on or turn it off. Let's go back to this plug. We need to wait a while, but go to the overview. Whether maybe let's create another. Let's call it plug Presaf here, let's call it. Let's call it plug one. And we can add the entities. Let's add all the entities. So as you can see here now, the plug is on. Also, it shows the current. It shows the voltage, and it shows the total power. After 5 minutes. And when we click on the plug voltage, you will see the history plot with the minimum, maximum and mini value. But when you go to the show more, and let's change the day to to date, let's change the hour as well. As you can see here, you've got plot from my sock a voltage and it's changing. You can observe it through this homocystant entity. Also, you can put on the history more than one entity. You can choose one more so the current as you can see here, you've got the voltage, and also you've got the current, but we can also choose the device. So it's the plug, and we'll got all four plots here. So you've got the plot with the voltage, current, the t power, and also when the state was on when the state was off. So I've got also state of the plug, the state of the child lock. And the behavior. So there will be no power, if it should remember last date or the plug should be turned on or turned off. Okay, let's play a little with the dashboard. Let's edit and add new section. Let's add the gauge. Change the entity to power, and we can set the minimum and maximum. Let's set maximum to 1,000. We can show the needle as well and we can define the severity. So let's make this value green up to 500 or maybe 100. And red above the 500. So right now up to 100 vats, it will be green 100-500, it will be yellow and above 500, it will be red. So right now, it shows us the energy consumption when we are with this consumption. Also, we can add another card. Let's add the history card. Ester graph. And let's change the NTT from sun to the the plug. And we can change ours to show to one. And let's call it Let's power consumption. Let's press safe. Right now, you can see the history of the power consumption from the plug. You've got the plot, and also here is the gauge. You can also add the badge. Let's add by entity. Continue at to dashboard done. So right now, you've got free places when you can see the current consumption. It's here, here, and it's here. Here, also, you've got the history plot, and I think it's really nice. Also add the voltage. You can do on the same plot, but it won't be visible, good, we can add another card and one time, one more time at the history graph, and let's change the sun to the voltage and changed over to one. Done. So as you can see here, here is the voltage changing in our socket. So the voltage level is not constant. I think my power grid is not in good shape. 16. 16.Power meter - Integral Helper Sensor: Okay. Let's now add the energy matter. So to do that, we need to go to the settings, devices and services helpers. We need to add helper to measure the energy consumption. Let's create a helper. And here you need to choose integral sensor. Let's call it power meter. So here you can use the prefix if it should be in kilo. But right now because it won't be huge value, leave it without any prefix. And let's select the input sensor. It's our plug. Here, the best integration method is left the man sum. Precision, you can leave it as it is, and max up in serval we can leave as it is because zeros for no time. And let's press submit. Perfect. And we can assign the area, but let's dip it without area right now. Let's press skip and finish. As you can see here, I've got the power meter, and when I press here, it shows the power consumption. So it's not the watts, it's the watts multiply by hours. So I consume three watt hours today. It will be increasing. So when the current power that is in the plug will be huge, it will be increasing and more rapidly. Also, you can click here to show more. You can change the day today. You can change the time. Select, as you see, it's increasing. Change to the PM, select. So as you can see, the value is increasing, and it always will be increasing. It won't be decreasing because how the power meter works, it only increases the power usage. Now when the power meter is added, we can go to the energy tab and we can configure the energy. Let's add the consumption, and we can choose our power meter. So this energy tab can track the costs of our power, but let's for now, do not track the cost. Let's press Save you don't have any solar panels. Let's click next next water consumption also. And here, it takes a while, but it will show also our power consumption. And we can choose the date. We can choose whole month. Or we can adjust it as we want it, but we need to wait a little to fulfill the data. Right now, it's showing here the current consumption, the power consumption. 17. 17.Temperature sensors: Okay, let's add one more view. Let's call it temperature. And that's all it is. So add the temperature from kitchen, from living room, and also add the humidity. And we can add the battery status. Perfect. And here we can add another section. Let's add the historigraph, not with the sun, but with the temperature kitchen and living room. Let's plot, last one. Our perfect. Right now, you can see the plot and you can see that temperature in kitchen decreases, but temperature in living room increases. Okay, let's install one more add on. Let's type it apex. And let's press down note. Bianchi but apex Okay. Because this graph is not perfect, we can install another one. Let's go to the hugs and let's install Apex Charts card. So here is the example how the charts can look like. And let's press Download. And we need to reload. So here is the installation process and the definition of what we can change, what we can adjust. But let's go to the temperature card, and let's add the card. So let's select the apex charts, and we need to modify it a little. So there is no graphic interface. We need to modify it in the Yam language. We need to remove that part and we need to remove that part. Also we need to change the sensors. Okay, here is the those two sensors. We can also change the spun. Maybe 2 hours, 2 hours perfect. As we can adjust the series. So we can change the name. Let's create some example, so we can change the stroke with Maybe here we do the same. Perfect. And also what we can do, we can show extreme extremes. So that option will show the maximum and the minimum value. You can press save the. And as you can see here, it's the same plot, but it also shows the extremas. Okay, let's add one more chart. Let's add the same apex charts. But we can modify it a little. Let's leave the column here. But we can also group it. Grow grop by by average and ration 1 hour And here we can. Also, add the graph span. Right now the graph span is set to 6 hours and because we've got on data from 2 hours, it will show the bars only 2 bars. But as you can see, those bar are grouped by 1 hour and the value is average value. So thanks to these Apex charts, we created two really nice looking plots. 18. 18.Backups: Let's talk about the home assistant backups. Backups are saved copies of your system configuration and data that allow you to restore your setup in case of issues such as fail updates, hardware failures or accidental misconfigurations. Backup can contain home assistant configuration. So Yama files, integrations, automizations, et cetera, databases like history, statistics, and logs, add ons and their data, for example, ESP Home, nodred, et cetera, media files and user data. There are two types of backups, full backup that includes the entire system configuration, addons, and all data, and partial backup that allows you to select specific parts to include, such as only the configuration or selected addons. Where backups are store. Backups are stored locally on a device running home assistant like Raspberry Pie. However, it's highly recommended to also copy them to external storage or cloud like Google Drive. This can be automated using home assistant Google Drive backup addon. When to create a backup, Bup should be created before update is before major changes, before device migration and they also should be created regularly. How to restore a backup? It's really easy. When you've got access to your home assistant, go to the system backups and select backup that you would like to create. When you have no access to your home assistant, so you cannot open the browser and go to the home assistant webpage. You need to do it in another way. So install fresh installation of home assistant. Boot the device, and on the boarding screen, you'll see the option restore from backup. Press that and select your backup file. Home assistant will restore the backup and reboot. Keep backup best practices. The first one is regular backups. Create a backup daily or weekly. The second one is of device storage. Store backups externally, such as in the Cloud for disaster recovery and third one pre change backup. Always create a backup before any updates or major system changes. In next steps, I will show you how to create a backup and how to download the add on that will allow you to create backups automatically and store them on Google Drive. To create a backup in home assistant, go to the settings system and backups. Then press Backup now and automatic backup. Right now, the backup is creating. After a while, backup is created. You can go to the automatic backups. Here is the list of your backups. You can download the backup or you can click the backup, select what you want to restore, and then you can press Restore. Now I will show you the second way how to create a backup that we automatically upload your data to Google Drive. Go to the settings add on store, and here, press the repositories. Paste link and press Add. Refresh the page, and at the bottom, there is a Home assistant Google Drive backup. Click it and press Install. Now, you can show it on the sidebar, so it will be visible here and press start. Perfect. The add on is running. Press it. Now, you need to identificate with Google Drive. Click the button and log into your account. Copy authorization string and paste it here. Press safe. Perfect. Right now, you need to create a folder when your backups will be created. Press, create a new folder. Now you can change if the error reports should be share or not share. Press, yes or no. You can also change some settings. You can change how many backups should be stored locally and how many backups should be stored in your Google Drive account. Also, you can change how many days should be between the backups. 19. 19.Automations: Let's talk about the automatizations. In home assistant, automatizations are rules that allow your smart home to respond automatically to events or conditions. Each automatization consists of a trigger, so what starts it, optional conditions, and the actions. So what happens? They help automate daily task like turning on lights at sunset, sending alerts or adjusting the thermostat when you leave home. Automatizations make your home smarter, more efficient and convenient. There are three main parts in automatizations. First one is trigger. So what starts the automatization? For example, you arrive home, a sensor reaches a certain value, an ocean sensor detect movement. The second one that is optional is condition. So the extra check that must be through for the automatization to run, for example, only if it's after 6:00 P.M. Or only if someone is home. Only if the temperature is below 20 degrees, and field one action. So what happens when the automatization is triggered and conditions are met? For example, turn on a light, play music, send a notification, set a thermostat. For example, when I arrive home, so it's trigger and it's after sunset, it's the condition. Turn on the hallway light. It's the action. What are benefits of using automatizations in home assistant? Convenience. Automatization handle task for you like turning on lights when you come home or starting the coffee machine in the morning. Energy efficiency, automatically turn off the devices when not needed. For example, lights off when no motion is detected, it saves energy and money. Comfort, maintain a comfortable environment by automating climate control based on temperature, humidity, or time of day. Time saving. You don't have to manually perform repetitive task. The system handles them for you. There are two ways to create automatization in Home asistem. The first one, the easy way is visual editor, and the second one, you can write it manually in amo. I'll show you in a second how to create automatization in visual editor. To create automation in home assistant, go to the settings, automation and scenes, create automation. And here, press, create a new. Now we need to add a trigger. So let's create automation when the temperature in kitchen will be below 20 degrees, let's turn on lamp. Let's press at a trigger. Let's search for entity and the numeric state. Let's select entity. So when the temperature is kitchen is below 20 degrees, and now we need to at action. Let's choose light. Turn on. Now we need to choose entity, and let's select lamp. We can also change the brightness of the lamp. But let's press safe. We can name it. Right now, when the temperature in kitchen will be below 20 degrees, it will turn on lamp. 20. 20.Blueprint: The last thing that I want to talk about is blueprint. Blueprint is a template for creating automization easily and quickly without writing Yam cloud from scratch. It's beginner friendly because it did not need to write a code. For example, a motion light Blueprint might let you choose a motion sensor, choose a light, set a timeout. Then home assistant creates the full automatization for you based on those inputs. To find blueprint, go to the setting automation scenes Blueprints, and let's press Import Blueprint. You can view Blueprint on the community forum. Let's find the low battery and notification and action and press Import Blueprint to my home assistant. Now the address is fulfilled. Press Preview. Press Import blueprint. Perfect. Blueprint, low battery and notification and action is visible. Let's press it. Okay, so this blueprint sent a notification and your battery level of your devices is low. The first thing that we need to do is select a trigger. The trigger can be button trigger, so you need to manually press the button to get a notification or the time trigger. I would recommend to use the time trigger. So every day at 12:00 A.M. This trigger will be triggered and this trigger will be checking if the device and battery is below a threshold. Here in battery settings, you can choose the threshold. So let's leave it 20% and you can exclude a battery sensor, but do not exclude battery sensor for now. Here in the Easy notify settings, you can choose where the notification should be. I would recommend to choose the user interface notification, select the enable user interface notification. That's all that you need to change. Let's press Save and let's click Rename. Perfect. When you go to the automatization, you can see here the low battery notification action. Each time when the battery go below 20%, you will get the notification, the notification area. 21. 21.Goodbye: We have now reached the end of our home assistance course, and I just want to take a moment to thank you all for your participation. It's been a real pleasure to guide you through the world of smart home automation. I hope you're leaving these cars with not only new knowledge, but also with the confidence to build your own automations and smart home solutions. I wish you all the best in your smart home journey. Keep automating, stay curious, and most importantly, have fun. Thank you again and goodbye.