I have recently been helping people out on forums and social media with there Smart Home setups and Automations. I have really enjoyed this and thought I would give it a go at creating content to help users and show off these things.
I will be creating content in the form of Videos and Blog posts on my website. If anyone is interested or wants to give me any advice or tips then please do.
I’m still new to being on the camera as I am usually the person behind it! I will be listening to all feedback on how best to improve my confidence, content and production quality.
I have watched many YouTube videos trying to learn how to configure Home Assistant. I feel many come up short as they present an idea but don’t do a good job of outlining what it really takes to implement it and some of the challenges and how to overcome.
For example,
Addressable LEDs, I am trying to put a light strip over my front door hidden in the trim. Going to control it with ESPHome. My use case is I want to individually control LEDs to use as indicators or a set of them to show visually the outside temperature. But all I could find was videos using ESPHome examples or WLED to create flashing lights. Maybe my use case is unique but how many YouTube videos do we need that show WLED.
Alarm Panel. I finally got an alarm panel configured the way I want. This took allot of effort mostly reading many forums and various websites. It took awhile to pull the pieces together as Home Assistant really just provides a state machine as you need to build out the sensors, automations and a way to control it. Couldn’t find much on this.
Presence Detection. Been trying to get this working well as I want to be able to set my alarm automatically when everyone is out of the house. But Home Assistant is not always notified when everyone is away, we are using the IOS app and I have checked settings etc… I am tracking devices using my router so perhaps a strategy using combinations of trackers is required. None of the videos I watched covered any of the challenges.
Zwave Setup. It’s a little confusing as there are 3 options for this (Openwave 1.4, Beta 1.6 and ZWavetoMQTT.). As a newbie this is confusing on what needs to be installed. It took me some time as the documentation on this is not good. But more importantly what is going to be supported long term. Video on pairing devices etc… Lots on Zigbee but not to much on Zwave setting it all up that we’re helpful for me.
So my Tip. I see you already have a YouTube video on “What is Home Assistant”, your not the first to do that. If you want to make your channel relevant then it can’t be covering the same topics as everyone else. Think about what you are trying to accomplish. Are you trying to educate, guide, entertain or just present an idea. That will drive the audience.
I to have spent a lot of time working out and setting up things that are unique to my specific needs. A lot of the custom things I have put together and setup aren’t documented anywhere online as they are custom and unique to me. I plan to show these off.
I plan to create regular content but first I will be creating basic guides to help people get to the setup state I am at, so that in the future they can follow along with my setup. The videos and content I create will try and be educational and target all Smart Home / Home Assistant enthusiasts of all levels and will all be created in my own style.
Also I hope to learn from the community as I may show something and somebody else can review it and tell me a better or more efficient method. It will be a great learning experience.
I hope to encourage people that have been thinking about smart homes to get started, inspire new smart home builders and just meet active users in this community
@MarkWattTech: Great start! If I wouldn´t be convinced of HA yet, after watching your video #2 I’d definitely be
@VikingBlod: copy paste for alarm panel plus especially presence detection. iOS and GPS is quite unreliable, I’ll go for router based detection. But (because phones are in flight mode during night) I still need a good trigger for setting a virtual “people are at home” sensor over night as well as an appropriate trigger for setting it to false and rely on router based presence detection in the morning. That´s really hard stuff for HA beginners. In-depth tutorial (video)s on such small but not that easy things would be really great to see. They are basic, almost everyone will face those topics doesn´t matter which devices will be integrated. I think it´s worth to cover those basic topics.
A massive thank you to the Home Assistant Community.
I have received lots of messages and hit 100 subscribers in a few hours. I created a quick video to say thanks and to outline some of the questions I have been asked.
This video is aimed at new smart home users wanting to setup Home Assistant for the first time.
Thank you for all of the support. I hit 300 Subscribers in 24 Hours! I am trying to improve with each video. Still haven’t managed to get the audio 100% yet and sorry for todays orange tinted video .
New Equipment arriving today so hopefully there will be improvements for the next video! As always open to any feedback and improvements.
As I have had to update my Neato D7 Integration to work with the new OAuth2 Neato Integration I thought I would share a video on one method of doing it.
The previous Neato Integration is broken in the latest HA Update (Release 2021.1)
Hope it helps some other Neato HA users.
I’ve put together a series of videos to highlight and explain the Home Assistant User Interface. These videos are aimed at people totally new to Home Assistant. It follows on from my Home Assistant installations.
Part 1 is available now. It covers the Dashboard user interface, and adding cards and views.
Part 2 will cover the main guts of Home Assistant that lie within the sidebar.
Over the weekend I updated some of my NFC sticker automations in the house and added a couple of new ones. I created a video showing some of my commonly used ones. I also created a quick video giving some basic info on NFC.
What are some interesting NFC tag automations you make use of?
If your interested in some handy NFC automation ideas go check them out
Following on from last weeks Navigation video, I have put together Navigating Home Assistant Part 2.
This video is designed for Home Assistant beginners looking for a simple descriptive tour around the menus.
In this video we will look at :
The User Profile
Maps (Zones, People, Users)
Logbook
History
Media Browser
There’s a lot to cover in this video. Some of the sections are lighter than others as we need to know about some of the bigger functionality of HA. This will be covered in Part 3.
If your interested, check it out :
I have a new video today showing you how to send notifications in Home Assistant in 5 different ways.
Specifically I will show you how to setup and send notifications using :
Persistent Notifications
Mobile Notifications
SMTP Notification (Email)
Alexa TTS Notifications (Have Alexa speak your notification)
Telegram (Send a notification via a bot)
The video contains setups for each of the notification types and a Dev Tools demo on each. If you stick around till the end there is a super simple automation showing you how to utilize what we have used in the dev tools demo.
Apologies for the Jankyness and cross cutting in the video. As I state at the beginning of the video, there where a few issues and the video was shot across a few weeks.
Constantly trying to improve and share useful and helpful content.
.
