Hello. Thank you in advance for any help or guidance you can provide.
I’m a non-techie. I have zero programming experience or skills, but I managed to get Home Assistant set up on a Raspberry Pi and have many devices operating in my home through this platform.
My first, most important question is:
Is there a go-to resource I can reference that is less technical, a Home Assistant for Dummies?
More specifically, here’s the problem I’m trying to solve at the moment.
I have three Elgato lights that frequently get disconnected from my network. I’m generally able to reconnect them by deleting the integration and re-installing it.
Two of three lights are now set up as “devices” in Home Assistant, each with three “entities.” The third light is not detected automatically, as the other two are.
When I try to “add device,” Home Assistant asks for a “Host*”; the system automatically populates (displays) a port field with a port number.
I’ve looked in the other Elgato device details for “hosts” but nothing displays. I’ve tried entering the third light’s specific IP address that is assigned by my router, for which I’ve created a “port reservation.”
I’ve searched online to determine what “Host*” references, but cannot find anything.
Any suggestions.
Apologies if I’m posting in the wrong forum. I’ve never used Discord and got completely intimidated after downloading it and creating an account. Thanks in advance to everyone for creating and maintaining Home Assistant. It’s a great platform! Not “easy” to use, but well put together and accessible even to Dummies like me.
Unfortunately I personally don’t have any good ressources for HA tutorials or guides, my only recommendation for such things, being it video or text, look out for the age of that article/video. Most things older than one or one and half years are outdated. HA has a fast pace, and authors tend to have a real life, so…
But I think I can help with your second problem. You were on the right track, “Host” means the IP address of the device. This refers to “host server” and in technical terms your Elgato device is a small computer, that is running as kind of a server. Leave the port as it is.
But what you should do is check your router again. If you didn’t misspell in your post, you shouldn’t need anything that has to do with ports! Especially not opening or reserving any ports. What the Elgato integration is setting is the port on that Elgato light device. Please disable this in your router.
And while you’re at it in your router, there should be a setting that is called “reserve IP” or something similar. It means the IP address assigned from the router to the device will be the same every time, even if the router is restarted or something else. This is important, as you otherwise would need to change the IP address every time the router changes it.
Home Assistant (and pretty much all FOSS projects) suffer from “by engineers for engineers” … great functionality - but the user interface is secondary, and documentation really just consists of developers’ notes Hey, I do get it … developers are contributing their spare time, so want to see the results or have fun hunting bugs - but documentation is a chore, and user guides are so much work to do properly. Fortunately there are people who are filling the gap - check out the “Community Guides” section here and there are several regular posters on youtube.
The situation is not made easier by Home Assistant going in so many different directions at once, supporting 1000+ official integrations (plus many more via HACS). There generally is more than one way to achieve any desired result - so be aware that all advice given is really “this is what worked for me back when I looked at it”. Which raises the other important bit of advice, as mentioned by Patrick … Home Assistant is evolving unbelievably quickly, so the “best” method or integration may change in only a few months. Do remember to check for the date on any article, blog post or video that Google may find.
Besides explaining some of the terminology the Glossary is also a good jumping off point when you’re groping through the documentation. Someone has set up an unofficial index, but as with all indexes, for it to be really helpful, you need to know what you’re looking for.
On the Host thing, I’m afraid it’s a feature of the UI that you are only asked for the IP address when you first set up an integration - once set up you never see it again, and the only way to check or change it is to delete the integration and start again. There’s a feature request somewhere.
A host is device on a network. When it is asking for host it is looking for either the ip address (eg 192.168.1.45) or a resolvable name like elgato-1234.home
Hey, I do get it … developers are contributing their spare time, so want to see the results or have fun hunting bugs - but documentation is a chore, and user guides are so much work to do properly. Fortunately there are people who are filling the gap - check out the “Community Guides” section here and there are several regular posters on youtube.