Unlock the Power of Home Assistant: 5 Lessons Learned

[@steveswoodworking2504]

Great tips! I already had a kill switch, but only one. Having several makes more sense. I love the idea of making all the helper inputs, and things aren't hard coded into the automations. I'll be making some changes!

[@MarsMountain]

This is a really good video. When I realized how to use boolean helpers as a master switch for automations it opened up a lot of ideas. For example, I like to show conditional cards for commuting time warnings if the estimated times are unusually long. So I use a boolean helper as condition for the automation so I can turn it off if I work from home etc. Also, I like to use buttons for toggling the boolean helper so I can use the optional long press feature to force the conditional card to be shown even if it has not been triggered. It gives me even more control over what is shown on the dashboard. Cheers!

[@SlackerLabs]

That’s a good idea!

[@martinrocket1436]

0:35 Kill Switch 3:00 Chose Action 4:35 Date Time Helpers 5:50 one dashboard 6:50 custom voice phrases 9:00 abstraction Feel free to copy these timecodes to your description.

[@gerryf7015]

Superb set of recommendations, Jeff. As I am old and new to HA, this will help immensely in my learning curve. :)

[@MattFacer]

Some great tips!! The date time and chooser are game changers, thank you!!

[@StijnSillen]

Great tips! I also like to use actionable notifications, for example to turn off the alarm or directly open the correct view in my dashboard.

[@traskth]

Hey Jeff. 100% agree about kill switches, saved my butt a couple times. Id love to know more about your weather based alarms. What triggers them? What alarms do you use? Have they actually come in handy for you?

[@SlackerLabs]

I’m going to talk more about the entities that power them in some upcoming videos about templates. But short answer is from the national weather service api. There is a HACS add on that integrates that api. Weather alerts might be the name. It’s pretty fast. Home assistant usually knows before the news web page shows it.

[@diedrichg]

I would love to see a video about your weather notifications. Tornado and winter storm warnings would be incredibly helpful.

[@scorrigan87]

I second this.

[@Tachikoma-sj6kz]

best HA vid i've seen in a while - love to see more detailed examples

[@carlosriquinha8036]

Another great video. I wish y’all could share your automations as blueprints in the description to make it easier to download and make progress from your expertise. Thanks for all the great vids

[@neilos2085]

I’m still praying for the 2023 Jarvis update video 🎉

[@SlackerLabs]

Yea. It’s on the list. I need to take a week off of work and just knock some these out.

[@cnelson2008]

I was using if/when to choose an action based on trigger, choose sounds a little easier! Thank you!

[@SlackerLabs]

It can be. I some times use the if/else inside my choose options as well just to to add a bit more flexibility. But it is all whatever works best for you. So many different ways to do this stuff

[@Wimpieseigen]

Thanks. The choose action is great. Some more info on the voice commands, nr. 4 would be helpfull. I use now voice actionable notification. But that is only for Alexa.

[@PatrickBulteel]

Ok, I can like this... but can I double or triple like it? I love the custom phrases.

[@samuraiintellectual]

Could use a little more detail in the Alexa voice section

[@ResinChemTech]

Hi Jeff! Been following your videos for a while and have even mentioned you a few times over in my own videos. Like you, I'm a tried and true YAML guy (I've still yet to create a single automation via the UI editor... I learned YAML back when you had to use it with Home Assistant... and I'm sticking with it!), but have also learned a lot from your use of YAML. I'll admit to cringing when you said you were moving all your automations over to the UI editor! I understand your reasons for doing it... but was wondering how that was working out for you, based on the complexity of some of your automations. I thought I might try touching base with you on Discord, but it appears that all your Discord links on your channel page have expired or are no longer valid. Maybe this is intentional... but thought I'd mention it just in case you did mean for the invite to be open. Regardless, thanks for the great videos and the stuff you share with the rest of us.

[@jaredgudnason4400]

abstraction.. I have a lot of smart switches, so i setup light templates on all the switches, so i end up with a switch entity, and a light entity for the same thing. Allows you to update the switch, and just have to update the light template once.

[@SlackerLabs]

Nice!

[@petergdk]

Wow - as a beginner, i would love to be able to do custom voice commands to my Google nest minis, but i have NO idea how to do it :) But nice to know it can be done. Thank you for the videos :)

[@SlackerLabs]

Routines in the google world as well. Or at least I had some setup the same way. Created a routine with a custom phrase. Then synced my scripts with google. I believe it sees them as scenes. Or at least did. I’ll have to go back and make sure they didn’t booked that. But at one time I had custom commands on the google devices too.

[@RNMSC]

I would start with an automation you can trigger in Home Assistant, preferably with a button or toggle helper. Then expose that helper to Google through HACloud, and 'Hey Google, Syncronize Devices' and Google should learn the helper. Now figure out what phrase you want to use, 'They're On To Us! Full Wipe!' or 'Red Alert!', or 'Open the Pod Bay Doors.' and create a google assistant routine that has that as a trigger. Now under actions for that routine, set up a step that toggles, turns on, or off that helper, then says "I'm Sorry Dave, I can't do that." or other inapropriate response. Finally, make sure that your automation resets that helper to it's 'idle' state (on/off, or leave it alone if it's a press and release button that auto clears.) I'd say that if there is a single action associated with the helper, you might set it with a self resetting helper, if you want different actions associated with turning on, or turning off the helper, you will want separate routines, and key phrases, then you can have the helper let you know what it does or discovers. As an example. Opening and closing the pod bay door, could be to open and close your garage door. If you set up your automation so that the system knows what the current state of the door is, you can set up your automation to check first whether the action makes sense, (opening the pod bay door does nothing if the door is already open, but the result may be a notification back to you that HAl couldn't open the doors because they are already open. Likewise if closed and you give the 'red alert!' command after you pull out. If the doors already closed because the home automation recognized that you had left, or had arrived and been in the house for some period of time, the automation would let you know that it can't do that for that reason. For both cases, you very much want to include a delay of some period of time to verify that the action was completed, and if it could not be, advise you that there appears to be a problem that will likely need further assistance. I.e. a garage door frozen to the sill, might need a bit of help with heat, or salt, and a door that starts closing, then reverses itself may be discovering that someone left their trike in the door path, or a board fell across the safety sensor beam. That would be a bit of an issue if it happened just as you were heading out for vacation, and you didn't find out about it till you got home 7 days later to an empty house. I would rather expose something that Google can trigger as a toggle or button, then act on that helper state change, over having google trigger an automation or scene directly. But that's me. In my case, my 'Night Night' routine has google toggling a helper that Home Assistant detects and starts a 5 min slow fade on the overhead bedroom light, and checks to see if the electric blankets need to be turned on, and resets those that might have timed out from the night before. My 'good morning' routine toggles a helper that brings the lights up over 30 seconds, and if the electric blankets are on, turns them off. One or both of these may be modifications of existing routines on my Nest Mini's. There is another option. If you don't want to use Home Assistant Cloud, and you're using something like a Kasa smart plugs, they can be controlled, by both, but while Google assistant doesn't generally trigger actions by monitoring the device, you can have Home Assistant monitor that device and when a routine, or even you, turns that device on, it can trigger an action on Home Assistant. Let's say you use a smart plug to power on a cell phone charger of some sort. You tell google to start charging your phone with a routine that simply turns that smart plug on. Now if that phone is being monitored by Home Assistant, it can see both that the switch is on, and that your phone is, or is not charging. Check again in a minute because some devices don't report a charging state right away, but after that use a timer to check ever 10 or 30 minutes to see if your phone has fully charged, and once that's happened, or you've unplugged your phone for some reason to head off somewhere, it turns off that switch. (And use a separate boolene to control that function, say if you're charging another device, that you don't want to have stop charging just because you and your phone have made that emergency run to the 24 hour grocery store because someone just used the last of the roll of toilet paper.

[@bill_automated1226]

Awesome stuff Jeff!

[@vaughanza]

Hi Thanks for a great video. Do you mind doing a video on Helps where I have a TTS announcement that my back door is open and it repeats every 20 min. Helper to toggle this on and off. Thanks again

[@MarkGhali]

Nice video Jeff! Thank you

[@EnricAragorn]

Yes friend. Trigger IDs with Choose (or IF-Then) is a must. I'm rebuilding all my autos with that! Do you know that you can repeat the Trigger ID in more than one trigger? is also great!

[@SlackerLabs]

Yea, I have some that use the same trigger id!

[@running_rich]

Thanks for these tips!

[@mikemannox4191]

oooh, number 4 custom voice commands... I never thought that I could skip the verbal diarrhoea that I get from Google Assistant, I'm sick of it repeating the command i.e. "Sure turning off XXX lights" or whatever. If you have time to show us how to set those up and disable the existing "Smart Speaker" commands then I would be very interested in watching a video on that :)

[@cascallana2626]

I'm trying to use a number helper to control my battery warning autoentities card, but {{ states(input_number.battery_level) | float }} doen't work for me

[@theimpulse77]

So I need to know what the Rex Manning day automations do. lol

[@SlackerLabs]

Ha. Right now it is tweets about it. And in the house plays Say No More (Mon Amour) through the house. And a few other Empire Records quotes. But there isn’t a day that either my wife or I quote the movie.

[@jkevinburton1979]

I know you don't like using dashboards, however you mention that others in the family can toggle their "text" automations, what does their mobile dashboards look like, what do you include? Also, could you do a video and walk us through whats in your dashboard?

[@SlackerLabs]

Yea. Absolutely. I need to do a smart home tour video. But it will be way different that most of them on KZbin.

[@jkevinburton1979]

@@SlackerLabs I am looking forward to that!

[@TheMrfazj]

I saw you had a helper for when your child was awake and the time, how do you set this time each day?

[@SlackerLabs]

So I could do a whole video on how I track my kid in Home Assistant...haha. But for the awake stuff there are two things. the input boolean and a datetime helper. Every night when he goes to bed, we kick off a good night routine, which sets all his lights, kicks off his bedtime music, and turns off the skylar awake input boolean. Then I have an automation that when there is motion in his room between 2 am and 8:30 am, it turns on the input boolean and sets the value of the time in the datetime helper to the current time. That way, when our morning update plays in the master bedroom with our morning alarm and reads out things like the current weather, whether its a school day, and whether he is going to want school lunch based on the scheduled lunch it also tells us if he is up and when he got up. It allows me to automate things not to happen if he is in bed so it doesn't disturb him and since his bedtime changes, since it is tied bedtime then everything can be dynamic. It also lets me have an automation if anything turns on in the theater during time 2am to 8:30 am we get an alert when it was him so we can go chase him back to bed sainted of finding that he has been up since 2:30 watching cartoons on Netflix.

[@yousaf.saleem]

Lovelace? wasn't it removed?

[@SlackerLabs]

It may have been renamed. I'm not sure if anyone uses "lovelace" anymore. But I still think of them as lovelace dashboards. They may have just simplified the naming.

[@asdkjh4370]

The biggest "power" oh HA are multiple integrations with serious privacy issues. - Dying platforms and lot of security issues now even more with Google deepening integrations.

[@SBinVancouver]

Noticed your Twitter "helpers". Could you explain how you use Twitter with HA? It wouldn't have occured to me.

[@SlackerLabs]

Sure. My smart home tweets, and toots on mastodon too. It just sends out random stats each day that it pulls from various sensors. And random snarky comments about smart home life, and movie quotes that were either modified or work as references. It only recently got turned back on. It used to tweet out links to my content. But things are a bit crazy right now so it isn't doing that. It's more fun than anything useful. But I have noticed several other houses out there are doing it as well. twitter.com/maisondeslunes_ and mastodon.online/@maisondeslunes