We've both tumbled down the Home Assistant rabbit hole, so this week we recorded an informal trip report on this sprawling open-source home automation system. Why would you want to replace your commercial hub? What sort of crazy scripting and automations can you come up with? Is it really worth editing .yaml files for all this? The answers lie within!
Will: [00:00:00] How do those triggers feel, man?
Brad: [00:00:01] Well right now they're pretty flimsy because there's no power running to them. There's no, this thing, this thing is inert.
Will: [00:00:06] Does it push back?
Brad: [00:00:07] It's, it's a Knoll sense right now. It's not sensing anything. Yes, they totally do.
Will: [00:00:12] Like, is it, does it push hard enough that you could not physically squeeze in on that thing
Brad: [00:00:17] um, I don't, well, it definitely has not done that. Like they, they, none of the tech demos or like game scenarios that I've encountered have been tuned in that way. I don't know what the actual maximum force is on these things.
Will: [00:00:31] They don't give you like a Newton number. It's not like this is 68 Newtons.
Brad: [00:00:34] this thing should just come with, like a proper, like profiling utility that just lets you adjust the tension and play with it yourself and like mess around.
But that's not, that would not be a very Sony like thing to do, but uh.
Will: [00:00:45] is that just on the triggers or is it on the sticks too?
Brad: [00:00:47] Actual resistance, the actual pushback. It's just the, just the triggers. Yeah.
Will: [00:00:52] Okay Interesting.
Brad: [00:00:53] Yeah the haptics on this thing are great, but they are haptics. You know, like you, if you have an iPhone or I presume most Android, these days have quite good, uh, haptics in them.
So like, that's impressive, but not something you haven't seen before, but this trigger thing is literally like I yelled out loud. I, I I admitted an involuntary explanation. The first time I tried one of these. I mean, they. Well, I'm limited in what I can say right now, but let's, let's say they go out of their way to present you some pretty extreme cases right up front.
Will: [00:01:23] Did the Xbox controllers have the same, the trigger rumble that they had last time. Okay.
Brad: [00:01:27] I believe It is the same. Yeah. Which is like, it's not, it's not insubstantial, but it's not like this.
Will: [00:01:32] I wonder if it's going to give them feature parody now. So we see, cause it feels like that trigger rumble on the X-Box one was something that like Forza used and I don't remember seeing it anywhere else.
Brad: [00:01:40] I don't, but I don't think those things can exert actual tension. Can they.
Will: [00:01:44] They can't it just, but it, I feel like, like the, the canonical example of where I saw that was like, when you were doing like a drift in and you need to kind of feather the gas and the brake in a racing game, and you kind of feel a little bit of a, like, you feel, it felt like something was happening.
There was no push back though.
Brad: [00:02:00] Right. I mean, these things are essentially capable of locking themselves. Like I've talked about it on some of the giantbomb content so far, but you know, you know, the elite controller, you know how it's got that feature where you can, you can reduce the throw or the, the kind of the size of the arc of the triggers to next to nothing for like call of duty, you know, games where you'd hit the trigger very quickly and that they do that physically or mechanically by shoving a piece of plastic in the way of the trigger.
These, these can replicate that exact same action, but just with whatever thing is going on in there that makes the triggers of resistive, or maybe resistive is not the right word to use because that's also an electrical term. Right. But.
Will: [00:02:32] But like, it's you you're feeling, it feels like the spring that holds the trigger back is stronger. Yeah.
Brad: [00:02:37] Literally, they can, wherever, I think wherever they want in the arc of this trigger, they can just make it like stop. I mean, you can push your way through it. You can force your way through it, but there's like a, there's a literal almost like snap and release feel of like pushing through the tension and then it kinda pops the.
It's the GameCube controller is the canonical example here, you know,
Will: [00:02:55] cause that had detent, right? The GameCube controller.
Brad: [00:02:58] what's that.
Will: [00:02:59] It had a detent where you pull like partway and then there's a second step like.
Brad: [00:03:01] Yes. And it stops. And then it
Will: [00:03:03] stick, trigger or something.
Brad: [00:03:04] of kind of clicks at the end. Like they can replicate that exact feel except they can't like mechanical you with whatever there. Do you have any idea of what tech is behind that?
Will: [00:03:11] It's just haptic feedback stuff. I don't know what, I don't know how they're doing it. I can't wait to see the tear down this, like of all of the new con console stuff. The PS5 controller is the thing I am most interested in.
Brad: [00:03:21] I could I lab in no world. Did I expect to be saying that the controller is the most interesting thing about these either of these consoles so far, but it totally is. At the same time, there is zero chance. I will ever take this thing apart.
Will: [00:03:32] No, no, you will. Cause the battery will dial eventually and you'll have
Brad: [00:03:35] Okay. Five, six years from now, we will no longer be fancy and fun and new and shiny, and then maybe fine.
But as of right now, working a sponger into the seam on this thing, feels like it would probably break something. So
Will: [00:03:46] Wait, are there not any, are there not screw holes on the back? Usually they're screw holes on the back.
Brad: [00:03:50] no, there are not,
Will: [00:03:52] Oh no. They're making it harder to open
Brad: [00:03:54] there are no exposed screws that I can see on this thing. So, uh, get your sponges ready.
[intro music]
Will: [00:04:33] Welcome to Brad and Will made a tech pod I'm Will
Brad: I’m Brad, Hello
Will: I also really liked that it has that the PS logo buttons on like in the grain to make it grippy. I think that's really cool.
Brad: [00:04:44] I think my eyes are not good enough. I can't see that. It just looks like a gritty Sandy kind of texture. I guess you need like a magnifying glass to see that.
Will: [00:04:52] I guess the other, the only other question I had is like the launch PS4, dual shocks felt kind of like rickety is not the right word, but they're creaky. This one. Does this feel solid? Like the second gen ones
Brad: [00:05:04] Yes, absolutely. Hang on. Let me open this drawer
Will: [00:05:08] Brad's opening a drawer.
Brad: [00:05:10] Fish out one of my DualShock fours, which I have way too many of
Will: [00:05:12] Oh yeah, me too.
Brad: [00:05:13] This is even one of the more recent ones that's got the light bar across the touch pad.
Will: [00:05:17] Those ones are. I think those are like, I really like those.
Brad: [00:05:20] you're you're not wrong. They're definitely better.
There still could get to the point after a lot of use where they're a little bit like basically if you grip the two kind of handles on the dual shock four and sort of twist gently, you can feel just a
Will: [00:05:31] It feels like you could snap it.
Brad: [00:05:32] it feels like there's a little bit of creek in the scenes of the housing. Right? You can just sorta like very gently flex it.
This thing has none of that. Like, it feels like a brick. It is like.
Will: [00:05:41] I wanna, yeah. I want to feel like I could Chuck that through a plate glass window and there'd be nothing wrong with it.
Brad: [00:05:45] it is really, really just sturdy and firm and like things built like a tank, man. It feels pretty good. Uh, they're shipping. I've been, I, I saw word going around this week that they were shipping and then sure enough, like on a couple of gaming forums today, I saw people posting photos of like, Hey, my dual sense arrived.
So I guess it's possible to buy them somewhere now.
Will: [00:06:07] I didn't order a PS5 and I kind of like. Yeah, this is the first time in 10 years, probably 15 years that I haven't like signed up for launch consoles.
Brad: [00:06:16] Not just there day one.
Will: [00:06:17] Yeah. And I've, I kind of didn't care, but now I have controller envy.
Brad: [00:06:22] yes, the FOMO is real in all situations, but, uh,
Will: [00:06:26] I mean, realistically all I play is Miles Morales. Cause I'm gonna play bug stacks on the PC and like, you know, anyway,
Brad: [00:06:32] miles Morales play in plays on the PS4,
Will: [00:06:35] that's also true.
Brad: [00:06:36] not with ray tracings.
Will: [00:06:37] No, I like ray tracings a lot. It turns out,
Brad: [00:06:40] I do too, uh, real quick before I forget, I just to throw this out there, episode idea that just came to me. If maybe go through the litany of console hardware failures, we've had over the course of our lives,
Will: Oh!
Brad:because I don't want to get off on a big tangent here, but if I were not in this line of work, I am like the, the furthest from the have to be there on day one early adopter.
Will: [00:07:02] it didn't, you never buy a wii.
Brad: [00:07:04] I mean, I never owned a wii. but I went, I actually did a mental inventory the other day and I can't think of a single console I have ever bought on day one in my entire life, except for the Nintendo 64. I take it back the Nintendo 64 is the only one I can think of.
Will: [00:07:19] I bought a wii on day one, but that's only because Gina was like driving by the game, stop in Como one day and saw a bunch of people lined up outside and was like, Hey, what are you guys in line for it? She was going into the FedEx office. It's like, Oh, this is the wii pre-order line. And she got the last one for the Colma GameStop.
So we had a wii, and that was, that was exciting. Cause those were things that were hard to find for like six or eight months.
Brad: [00:07:40] Well, that was an investment. Like if you decided you didn't like the wii you could still flip it from easily more than you paid for it.
Will: [00:07:46] Oh, yeah. And then the XBox 360. I got real close to launch. Like I bought it from eBay because I was so hyped about geometry Wars. And then I put like a hundred hours into geometry Wars
Brad: [00:07:56] Geometry Wars is a very good game.
Will: [00:07:58] Very good game
Brad: [00:07:58] Uh, but like, I, I just, I was so burned the, uh, PlayStation and PlayStation two generations by console hardware failures that I have never early adopted again.
Will: [00:08:08] Yeah, my, my PS4, I bought a PS4 for tested for us to take apart at launch and that one is still going strong. Um, and my XBox ones, I like all my, the only, the only consoles I think I've ever had. Well, anyway, this is a good episode idea.
Brad: [00:08:22] we'll get into it sometime, but yeah, like I, yeah, well, yes.
Will: [00:08:25] Um, but, but, uh, well today, Uh, we started talking about this ages ago.
I have spent a lot of time over the last couple of months. Finally moving everything over from a closed proprietary, smart home system called smart things that Samsung owns now over to the open equivalent or one of the open equivalents called home assistant. It's been a journey.
Brad: [00:08:49] but yeah, I'm sure. Right. So I also just last weekend, I have started following in your footsteps. Um, So I thought it'd be fun to talk about it, but, uh, I'm trying to look up here because if, uh, if you haven't listened to all of the episodes of the show first, why not? Second of all,
Will: [00:09:06] I don't, I don't expect everybody to love everything that we do anyway.
Brad: [00:09:09] I'm just kidding.
Second of all, I'm looking for it here. We did a, so we did a home automation episode. Gosh, last fall, probably one
Will: [00:09:18] was early, but it was kind of about hardware and stuff. Not like it was more.
Brad: [00:09:22] it was kind of a primer. It was basically like an intro to home automation and sort of like, here are some of the major platforms and standards, but we didn't get too deep into any one of those things.
Um,
Will: [00:09:34] so.
Brad: [00:09:34] we talk about our paths to home assistant? Like why did you want to get onto
Will: [00:09:38] Yeah. So, um, a couple of things happened earlier this year. One is that wink, which is one of the other, so most home automation systems, you set up, you have a bunch of devices that are from a bunch of different manufacturers. And then there's like one hub that kind of corrals all of them and knows how to speak to all of those.
And the goal when you're buying the hub is to get the one that talks to all of this stuff that you have and all of this stuff that you might want to have in the future. And then, um, It provides the services you need. So what you want to, if you want to use like voice assistance, you want it to connect to Alexa and Google home and Siri and all of that stuff
Brad: [00:10:10] is, is there one hub in the commercial space that actually does that? They can talk to every single one of them. That seems impossible because there are so many standards and networks to account for.
Will: [00:10:19] Smart things has really wide adoption. Like they, they connect to a ton of stuff over API. They have partnerships with Google and Amazon and all that stuff. So your Alexa and your Google assistant and all that stuff work, they don't work super well with Apple stuff cause they didn't jump into the home kit.
Uh, the, the, you know, the home kit hardware for a, um, but there are solutions for that, like the home kit bridge thing, uh, which will basically let you set up, uh, uh, uh, it's like a, it's like a translation layer between home kit and smart things. Um, it's why I went with them, but they just killed their V gen one API stuff, their first rev 1 API stuff, and forced everybody to roll over to Samsung accounts and because of a comedy of errors, uh, that basically involved me taking over.
Somebody signed up for a Samsung account with my email address and rather than kill that account, I, I, it doesn't matter. The upshot is my Samsung account was irrevocably tied to India and the home assistant, the smart thing stuff has, uh, um, uh, FCC type regulations. So if you're in the wrong region on your Samsung account, certain things won't work because they are in, they use radio bands that are not available in the regions that you're signed up for them.
Brad: [00:11:31] That's a lot to deal with.
Will: [00:11:33] Yeah. So I was going to have to reset up the whole thing from scratch. And I was just like.
Brad: [00:11:35] just to schedule your lights to come on at a certain time.
Will: [00:11:38] well, I mean, look, it was, I made a mistake, but also Samsung didn't help me fix the mistake. So, um, the, the big takeaway is that if I was going to have to go back and reset up all this stuff, I wanted something that was more capable than what I could do with smartthing
Brad: [00:11:52] and, and, and more generalized, right? Just more, more universal for all the different brands.
Will: [00:11:57] Yeah. Something that I could hack my own shit into if I wanted to.
Brad: [00:12:00] Totally, I'm in a pretty similar boat, except that we were all Apple home here for better or worse, mostly for worse. Um, first of all, like you, you referred to the home kit hardware situation as a fray. Which I think is pretty apt. Um, it's a, it's a weird scene where like a ton of devices just don't have support for it at all.
My understanding is that Apple's security requirements to be branded as home kit compatible are pretty onerous. Is that right?
Will: [00:12:24] there is a hardware requirement, which, which adds actual costs and people like in the, in the spaces that a lot of this stuff operates. If you say, Hey, we have a 10 cent chip. We want you to add on, they're going to give you the finger and hit the door.
Brad: [00:12:38] Totally in a lot of device categories. We just could not find what we wanted that was compatible with home kit in the first place. The stuff that we do have, uh, I found it to be super unresponsive. Like it would just go dead. Off and on where I would have to, like, I have to pull the dresser out or like fish under the bed and pull the smart plug out and plug it back in to restart it.
Because in the home app it just said not responding and like could never figure out any rhyme or reason to that stuff.
Will: [00:12:59] Do you have an Apple TV, a current gen Apple TV that works as the home kit hub.
Brad: [00:13:02] So, so no. So this was, this is a kind of tertiary consequences of this whole thing, but it is another nice thing about moving to home system. I was using my iPad pro as the hub. And as I will get to this, but as I have gotten onto home assistant and stopped using that iPad as a home hub, the battery life has like quintupled.
Will:Oh yeah I’m sure
Brad:It is insane. Like that thing would, the thing would drain half its battery in like 24 hours just sitting around before. And now it's like 95% after, after a day. Um,
Will: [00:13:30] Well so the bad news is you still are probably going to use something as a home hub, although I guess
Brad: [00:13:34] Well, there, there are solutions in homelessness and for that, which we'll we'll get to. And then the other thing, not to just sit here and complain about Apple home all the time, but we got hit by the super widespread bug where I could not invite my girlfriend to my home, no matter what we did. Like there's some weird loop on the Apple, like server end, where.
Will: [00:13:50] Oh, weird.
Brad: [00:13:51] You send an invite and they accepted on their end and it looks like they're in, but it just says invite pending on your end for months at a time. And like Reddit is full of people with the same problem. And you have to like call Apple and play the customer service rep roulette or situation where like, if they know what you're talking about, the less engineering and blah, blah, blah.
Anyway.
Will: [00:14:10] Well, so, so also the other thing that happened this spring is that wink just said, which was the other big, like open third party came in and were like, yeah, if you guys want to keep using our service, you've got to pay five bucks a month.
Brad: [00:14:23] So were they open source before? Or were they always,
Will: [00:14:26] They were closed source but free. So you bought a piece of hardware and then like a Phillips tried to do the same thing with early Hugh hubs.
They, they killed off all their early hue hubs and they didn't try to charge, but they said, Hey, you need to buy a new hub. If going to keep using your, your $80 light bulbs. Um, so, so like there's a lot going on in that space, as things are consolidating, um, Google has killed two hubs, I think now that they've purchased like for IP purchases, it seems like, or for team purchases,
Brad: [00:14:53] Well, yeah, it didn't it wasn't there some big thing with nests shutting down a major service, not a week or two ago.
Will: [00:14:58]So nest closed up a lot of their API APIs, so that like you like, just anybody can't get an API key and then have full right access to your house. The thing that they did is a good thing. They just kind of handled it poorly as in, in a true Google fashion. Um, But, but yeah, so I looked at the different things that were out there.
We talked about them a little bit in that last episode. And one of the big pieces of feedback that we got was that people really like home assistant from that, from that first home home automation episode.
Brad: [00:15:24] it seems like it seems like the most active community from what I've seen, like there's, what are the others that, you know, there's, there's open Habs seems like the other big one that I'm aware
Will: [00:15:31] Open hab is the other biggish one, but like in terms of wide hardware, like what I was looking for honestly, were wide hardware support and good documentation and home assistant had that in all of the things that I had hardware for. Um, and, and like, it's, it is really apparent that they spend that somebody there is spending a lot of time taking forum posts and turning them into actionable documentation
Brad: [00:15:54] it's true. They have very good guides on all kinds of stuff. I couldn't, I can attest to that.
Will: [00:15:58] Yeah. It's it's it's um, it's, it's really well done. Um, I went through a whole path trying to get it set up and running. We don't need to go through all that necessarily, but I tried putting it in a free NAS jail.
Brad: Same
Will: Um, since it's designed to run on Linux, I got it mostly working, but then like it wouldn't connect to HomeKit devices or my Lutron certificate, getter app wouldn't work or whatever.
Like there were 50 different things that failed in weird ways. And finally, I was just like, fuck it. I'm going to buy a $30 raspberry pie and put it on that because my time is worth more than making this work on the thing that honestly, I'm probably going to get rid of and change over to something else sometime in the, in the next 12 months.
Brad: [00:16:38] I feel, I feel like my time with free NAS slash trueness is growing, ever shorter.
Will: [00:16:43] Look, I love my Plex server and, and the, the ecosystem around that. But I have no, absolutely no, uh, loyalty to free NAS at this point. Anyway, different topic another day
Brad: [00:16:55] Yes. Yes. So you're on you're you're on a PI three.
Will: [00:16:58] So I put it on a pie I try to pie one because I had one laying around that wasn't that wasn't going to, that dog would not hunt. Um, the raspberry PI three rev B that I got was fine.
They recommend a four. I think you're fine with a three. It seems like the upgrade is pretty seamless. If you want to move, just like you just, you can just move the card over maybe, and it'll continue working. Um, if you're going to do ZigBee and Z-Wave devices. So these are devices that use a specific re uh, radio.
Then, uh, you need to get a dongle that supports those. There's like a handful of things that are supported on a list. Um, I went with the go control. C, C O M M I N O D zero one six one six four H U S. BCB dash one.
Brad: [00:17:43] really rolls off the tongue.
Will: [00:17:44] It really just roll off the tongue, but it's a Z-Wave slash zigbee device, a home assistance, sees it, just find on the raspberry PI install and it works like I'm looking at it right now.
It works great. There's a little blue light on it. Um, And then, uh, you need, uh, so the installing the OS is a lot like other raspberry PI projects. You don't have to install Raspbian or raspberry Pie OS or anything like that. There's a, there's a, it's called Hasso S install that basically has the raspberry PI, the Raspbian image.
Pre-configured and you just burn that with Belina etcher and jam, the SD card in, and you're good to go. And then it walks you through the install. Like you've probably done the install process more recently than I have.
Brad: [00:18:26] Well, so I did it differently because of course I did. Um,
Will: [00:18:30] Of course.
Brad: [00:18:30] well, so I use this as a, as an excuse to get a raspberry PI four, finally, which I had been putting off until I had an actual project to do with it. Um, I've got a one and a two, uh, I've got nut running on the one and a pi hole running on the two.
Um, but so I, I got the, actually, I, I convinced myself to get the pi four 8gb model
Will: [00:18:52] Hey, big spender.
Brad: [00:18:53] Cause I want to do other stuff with it. Like I'm like, that's kinda the whole thing with having this free NAS machine. It's free BSD based and you can't do any of the fun Lennox stuff you want without like 8,000 headaches.
So I just wanted a nice little multipurpose Linux machine sitting around that I could tinker with and learn Linux better.
Will: [00:19:09] See, this is what, this is why you need that proxy mox installed on the NAS
Brad: [00:19:11] Yeah. I something about virtualizing still just doesn't sit right with me, man. Like I just want to run stuff on the bare metal. It's just call me old fashioned. I don't know.
Will: [00:19:20] You're old fashioned.
Brad: [00:19:22] OSs inside of other OSs just, it doesn't, it feels icky.
Will: [00:19:25] Look, man. It's the whole world runs on virtualized OSs
Brad: [00:19:29] I know, I know, but the whole world doesn't run on my five-year-old gaming PC.
Will: [00:19:34] That’s true. That's true
Brad: [00:19:35] Um, I kind of squeeze every ounce of performance out of that thing. Anyway. Um, the, the point is I wanted to actually put a Ubuntu on Ubuntu server on that PI four instead of Raspbian or I don't. Why did they change the names of raspberry PI iOS
Will: [00:19:48] Uh, there were,
Brad: [00:19:49] Raspbian is such a better and easier name.
Wait,
Will: [00:19:52] see, uh,
Brad: [00:19:53] Wait, did somebody did somebody in the Debbie and community get mad that it sounded too similar or something
Will: [00:19:57] no, I think it was because they didn't want raspberry PI distributing images using the Raspbian name. So that's why I, there, there was a post just, this is why we need that. Spin off podcast. Scene dreama
Brad: [00:20:09] I haven't seen drama
talking about? Oh, so, so I put, I put a Ubuntuserver on there, which is, seems pretty nice. Now, as far as. Linux districts that are not Raspbian for a PI.
Will: [00:20:23] Oh yeah, that's fine.
Brad: [00:20:24] anyway, you're not wrong. Like the home system people have tons of fantastic guides and they have, they have a guide on there for if you're familiar with Python somewhat, you can set up a virtual environment and install home assistant into that, which is a nice encapsulated way to run it and still have access to the base system.
Will: [00:20:39] So, so when I did that, so that's how I did it on the free Nas jail. Um, and when I did that, a lot of stuff like the, the, some of the things that are really good features like the home assistant community store, which is like, basically they have different silos of integrations for hardware. And like one is like the main branch stuff that's in the main github.
And then the other, the other, there's another one that is things that the community has developed that they make. Easy to install through this HACs thing that a different team team works on. Uh, but, but isn't necessarily vouched for by the core team. And I could never get that to work on the Python install.
Brad: [00:21:20]Okay so, um, I'm glad you did it the mainstream way then because yes, there are some things I miss in fact, the way I did it, they actually refer that to that as like home assistant core, I think. Um, so, so that's, there's that store, is that separate from the supervisor?
Will: [00:21:34] The supervisor.
Brad: [00:21:35] that's another thing I missed out on.
Will: [00:21:37] There are several features that come that I could not get working on free free NAS. One was the file editor, the built-in terminal, like all, there's a lot of quality of life stuff, but the community store was the big thing, because if you don't have the community store then to install community, ad-ons you end up having to like curl into, github and run script installation scripts off of GitHub,
Brad:Yeah now we’re talking.
Will: which is fine
Brad: [00:21:57] let me tell you,
Will: [00:21:58]Right up until the moment that you need to update something.
Brad: [00:22:00] dude, I was resisting the urge to talk about the case I got for that pi four.
Will: [00:22:03] Oh, what'd you get.
Brad: [00:22:04] I got the argon one, which you should look up. It's just this fucking huge solid hunk of aluminum comes with a daughterboard on it. That routes all the ports around to the back.
Will: [00:22:13] Oh I like that
Brad: [00:22:13] It’s got a, it's got a fan controller on it and the way you install the fan controller software is to literally.
Uh, curl to .sh shell script on their server and pipe it straight into your, into your shell.
Will: [00:22:25] Also you become part of their bot net and they're always read the script.
Brad: [00:22:29] I actually read the entire script just to see what was going on in there and it's pretty benign. Um,
Will: [00:22:34] Your raspberry PI is probably not mining Bitcoin then.
Brad: [00:22:35] was, I was, I was very excited about the whole thing, but, uh, but yeah, like there, there are features that you get by going the pre imaged kind of full install route that I don't have.
So what is the supervisor? Do you know?
Will: [00:22:46] So the supervisor is the thing that controls, um, it like, it, it, it is the thing that controls home assistant. Overall. So, so there's the OS and then there's the program home assistant running. And then there's a bunch of components inside home assistant. And, and this is one of the things that you learned the hard way doing this, but like, if you make a change to say a script or an automation or something like that, unlike every same piece of software I've ever used home assisted, and doesn't when you mash save reload, those scripts for everything, it does that once you finish doing like, you have to do it manually, or you have to restart the server.
Brad: [00:23:23] I have learned that you're right.
Will: [00:23:24] so the supervisor, um, gives you access to this, the ad-on store, which is like a middle somewhere between the community store and the, the main core tools. Um, it gives you the ability to reboot the machine. It lets you see like how much Ram you're using your change, your host name and IP address, like, like OS kind of stuff, right?
It lets you choose whether you're on the stable channel or the beta channel. And it gives you log access to like system logs, not home assistant logs.
Brad: [00:23:54]Yeah that does soundpretty useful. I've gotten pretty used to just restarting the whole service. Every time I make a change, which, works.
Will: [00:24:00] well, so, so you can do that. You can restart the individual bits in server controls and configuration like w so
Brad: [00:24:07] That's a complicated piece of software. It is not the most user-friendly thing I have ever encountered.
Will: [00:24:11] It is. And there's like a lot of stuff that happens in multiple places. And sometimes that matters and sometimes it doesn't like you. If, if you are going to go this path and you're used to using smart things like a, you're going to want to do a really gradual transition and get one, like, understand how something works on a room where your home automation, shit being bad.
Isn't going to annoy everybody else in your house. So like, I, I have been working in my office for the last two months until I had a pretty good grasp on everything and then moved everything over. Um, but, but the, but the, like the thing I will say is the documentation generally is good. And if the documentation isn't, then there's a forum thread and the forums, especially on the github and the home assistant community forums are both pretty non-toxic as far as open source, like if you're used to free NAS forums, these are going to be really friendly and lovely as long as you're not a jackass.
Brad: [00:25:01] Yes, absolutely. Um, so there are, I just want to rattle off some terms here.
Will: [00:25:06] yeah, hit me.
Brad: [00:25:07] Uh, just to give people kind of an idea of the scope of this thing. When you load it up for the first time there are devices, entities, integrations, automations, scripts, scenes areas, zones.
Have I missed any?
Will: [00:25:25] Well there's a bunch more of these people. There's users. Why are there people and users, Brad?
Brad: [00:25:30] Why? Why are there areas and zones?
Will: [00:25:32] Well, so users
Brad: [00:25:32] And scenes. I mean, I know the answer to that question, but that's the thing though. It's like you read all these terms and a lot of them sounds relatively synonymous and it's not, that's what I mean about this not being the most intuitive thing is it's not always obvious.
Like what is the difference between a device and an entity? You know, why, what is it, how does an area distinct for me zone that kind of thing.
Will: [00:25:49] well, so I think. This isn't like a straight, how to cause your set up is going to be different than my setup. And the listener setup is going to be different than either of our setups, but there is a lot of stuff that I'm sure I found out the hard way. And you're probably in the process of finding out right now.
And I think we can go, we can go through some of this stuff and it will help under help people understand this better.
Brad: [00:26:09] actually, but before we get to that, like, I don't want to sound too critical of this thing because it seems pretty fantastic when you get your head around it.
Will: [00:26:14] it's, it's amazing. Like it is so good.
Brad: [00:26:17] but the thing I want to, the thing I want to say in its favor is that, so I installed it, I got it up and running. I went to the web interface and.
Once I found my way to integrations, which turns out to be the kind of base level. Like here's how you get your Samsung stuff in. Here's how you're get your Apple stuffs, your Google stuff, your ZigBee stuff. You know, it's like the basic service layer. When I went there for the first time, it had found like everything on my network and including things that I didn't know could be automated.
Like my Roku, my Sonos, um, my little. Bootleg iTunes music server that I run on my NAS. Like it found a bunch of things that I didn't even think could be integrated into our kind of home automation ecosystem. Like it's pretty, it's pretty impressive at auto detecting all that stuff
Will: [00:26:56] So the thing I will say is that right now, part of this is confusing because they're kind of in a transition period right now, um, early in the development of the software in order to add new integrations. So an integration is. Is like the interface between home assistant and any other device, right?
Brad: [00:27:14] So like a, a good example is we have, we have a bunch of the TP link, Casa smart plugs. Cause they're because they're pretty cheap. And my girlfriend got a couple from work for free, so we just have a lot of them. And so like adding the TP link, Casa integration is what you do to get all of those into home assistant like that.
That's, that's an example. It's like a brand is associated with an integration essentially.
Will: [00:27:34] And like, just to be clear, like it detected my printer.
Brad: [00:27:37] Yeah.
Will: [00:27:39] it, it knew that I have some IPP compatible printer. Is it added? Whether it added my Lutron stuff, it added a lot of check harmony hubs, all of this stuff just got detected automatically. You can add stuff manually that it doesn't detect automatically.
Um, But like, it's pretty that like that whole process was really straight forward and that's kind of the beginning place. Now in the old days, there wasn't a web UI for setting this stuff up. You just added, you like edited a yaml file
Brad: [00:28:07] Yeah. And a lot of the documentation you'll find out there is still very much based on editing yaml files.
Will: [00:28:12] Well, and some of the integrations like to add Alexa and Google support manually the Google assistant support manually. You have to do yaml files. Um, you have to edit the yaml file. It's there's not, it's not like writing Python code or even scripting yaml stands for yet another markup language. So it's kind of like HTML.
Brad: [00:28:30] Wait. Isn't it. I think it, hang on. Isn't it recursive? I think it's, isn't it. yaml ain't a markup language.
Will: [00:28:36] Oh, maybe it, it might be a yaml ain't markup
Brad: [00:28:38] yes, yes. That's what it is.
Will: [00:28:39] Shit anyway. So, uh, the upshot is, the language is really easy to understand just by looking at it. Like, it's, it's just like a series of nested tags and you can kind of put things in and out and it's, it's not, it's not hard to use
Brad: [00:28:52] I think it's more straightforward than Jason from what I've seen.
Will: [00:28:55] It is way easier than Jason.
Um, it is probably easier even than HTML, other than the fact that people learn HTML in middle school. Um, the, the, but, but most of the stuff that you're going to use probably now and going forward, we'll hopefully have like the web based integration. Cause that's, that's a little bit easier to manage.
Brad: [00:29:13] A little bit, but I should point out when you add devices that are still a lot of like names with a lot of underscores in them and like kind of very technical terminology applied to a lot of stuff. Like it's not, it is no, like it is no Apple home or something like that. Like it's not that user-friendly.
Will: [00:29:27] Yeah. So what you're trading, when you go with home assistant over Apple home or smart things or something like that yeah. Is a lot more pain on the setup that you do presumably one time and then never futz with again, uh, for, um, the ability to do much, much, much, much, much more complicated. Uh, uh, automations with a wider variety of devices and APIs.
So like there's a fair amount, like for example, to set up the lutron switches that I have, because my house has two wires. So Lutron Concetta switches will smart switches will work with two wirehouses with no neutral. And in order to set those up, you have to have a hub, but you have to get an API key.
And the only way to get an API keys by logging into the specific website with a preformed header. So you basically install a PL an add-on. To home assistant that generates the API key. And then you copy that API key and put it in the yaml file. And then it just shows up and starts working magically. Like you don't have to do anything else.
Brad: [00:30:23] that is both very cool to me. And also sounds like a giant pain in the ass also. Can I derail you for a second?
Will: [00:30:28] It's a pain in the ass one time. Like that's, that's like all the stuff we're talking about so far is single use hassle for long-term comfort. Yes. Derail.
Brad: [00:30:37] What is, what does, what is this two wirehouse businesses? That's some homeowner thing that everybody who owns a house knows about what
Will: [00:30:43] if you have a house that was built after like 19. Somewhere in between the seventies and nineties, depending on where you are and what code is, there's three wires going to every light switch. There's a hot a ground, and then a neutral wire. Um, the neutral wire basically lets it shut off excess energy.
So if you'll they get dimmer and you don't need all the electricity going to the lights, some of it goes down the neutral and I don't know what happens to it at that point. Magic happens. Um, if you have an old house, like I do, you have two wires coming into everything and there's, there's an assumption that somewhere between those two wires is going to be a thing that turns on or off, and that's what makes the light work.
And if you want to have smart dimmers on incandescent, non incandescent bulbs, you have to have somewhere for that extra energy to go. Except Lutron has figured some shit out and patented it. So they're the only ones that have it. That works. Or maybe they're the only ones that have bothered to do it.
The upshot is if you, if you have a two wire house until the Lutron Caseta stuff came out, you were probably better off getting smart bulbs rather than trying to find smart switches that would work anyway. Okay. So we talked about integrations, uh, devices and entities, entities are each like physical device?
Brad: [00:31:56] wait, really? I thought that was devices
Will: [00:31:58] No, no, no.
Brad: [00:31:59] all right. This was educational for me too.
Will: [00:32:00] an entity is a container D sorry. Other way around. You're right. You're right. Devices are the container and each device can have multiple entities attached to it
Brad: [00:32:09] okay. Yes, this is yes. We were not kidding. Like this stuff is really hard to keep track of.
Will: [00:32:13] Yeah. For example, like if you have a smart plug, often they will tell you like how much energy is being used in any given moment.
Uh, so a, a smart plug device might have an on-off entity that controls whether that switch has getting power or not another entity for how much power, if it's like a dimmable switch and a third for how much power it's actually consuming at any given moment.
Brad: [00:32:37] Okay, this is starting to make sense.
Will: [00:32:39] Yeah. So, um, let's see. Another example, like I have an Anon labs motion sensor in the living room that also measures temperature, humidity, uh, luminosity, and I think noise, maybe one other thing, um, at each of those is entities under that one device.
Brad: [00:32:55] yes. So you're, you're the actual most extreme example. I don't know if you've, have you paired any mobile devices with this thing?
Will: [00:33:00] Oh yeah. Your phone gets, it goes
Brad: [00:33:02] I'm sitting here. My, my iPhone eight has roughly a dozen different entities associated with it. So like battery, state, connection type distance, floors ascended, floors descended, uh, geocoded location activity better.
Did I say battery level,
Will: [00:33:18] no, but that's in there too yeah.
Brad: [00:33:20] battery level, average active pace, like, like all of those things are broken out as separate things that home assistant tracks. And presumably I assume you could tie automations and like, Scripting stuff to any one or multiple of those things like, like that. That's where the magic and I haven't dug into this stuff really at all.
I know you have a little bit, but that's where, that's where the potential for magic seems to be with this thing is like the ways that you can mix and match data from different devices to come up with, like these ridiculous automation scenarios based on like eight bajillion criteria, seems like pretty awesome.
Will: [00:33:50] So I have a weather station that Gina and my daughter got me a few years ago for Christmas. And when I connected that thing in it, it popped like 65 different things. Cause not only does it give me like the temperature, the carbon dioxide, the humidity, the noise level, the barometric pressure. It also gives like, How, what the battery state for the devices and like weather, weather, when they last connected to the radio and whether they can be pinged right now.
And like it's it's is pretty ridiculous anyway, so, okay. So that's devices and entities. Um, when you set these up, you can choose to name them. It is very important that you give them names, that you're going to be able to tell what they are
Brad: [00:34:30] Yes,
Will: [00:34:31] because sometimes it's really hard to tell. What's what, it's also super important that you give everything a distinct name and you want to do all of that before you start making any automations, because the automations are just flat text files, that, that the thing generates.
So if you change the name of an entity or device after you've created automations, you're going to have to go back into those automations and manually change the names
Brad: [00:34:53] that
Will: [00:34:53] to match the names that you changed it to.
Brad: [00:34:55] That really hurts.
Will: [00:34:56] Yeah. Um, so areas and zones, this is an easy one. Uh, an area is a room in your house. A zone is any place else in the world that you're interested in something happening when a person from your house goes into or out of.
So, for example, if you wanted to have some automation happening at your house, when you reached the office at home at work, imagine a time when we left the house.
Brad: Okay sure
Will: Um, or if I wanted to have something happen where my daughter gets to school, like if I want to, if my daughter gets on the bus in the morning, I want to get a notification.
When she arrives at school, I can trigger that using zones.
Brad: [00:35:36] that is Extremely cool. And also, kind of terrifying
Will: [00:35:38] I mean, look, the, the. There's so Gina and I have shared locations with each other for years now, it is incredibly useful for me or for her when she's like, Hey, can you stop at the grocery store to know when I'm in the car and not have to like call me and be like, Hey, are you in the car? I need you to stop and get some hot dogs or whatever on the way home from work.
Brad: [00:36:02] I'm sure like parenting is, is such a, uh, kind of seat of your pants situation. That privacy is a secondary concern to just getting things done.
Will: [00:36:11] Well, I mean it's yeah, I guess, I mean, I look, I don't, I everybody's relationships are different. I don't. Yeah. Like, like, yeah, we're not doing anyway. That's a whole different conversation. Um, but the upshot on this is that I want to make the Weasley clock from Harry Potter, which I don't like the, the Weasley is have this clock where they're like, there's a hand for each kid, each person in the family.
And like they point toward work and school and home and mortal peril and like, and you could totally do that using zones,
Brad: [00:36:43] man. That's cool.
Will: [00:36:44] right? Like it's such a stupid thing. Um, but, but like I was even thinking about just doing like an LCD screen with like, with like the letter, LCD screens, like a train terminal, the kind of thing that just pops up and is like, okay.
Will, is at, is sitting in the office. Gina is at school. Kiddo is, you know, out in mortal peril, right?
Brad: [00:37:07] So this is the actual reason I really wanted to do this episode. Like, all I've done with home assistant so far is just replicate the functionality that should have worked in Apple home and did not.
Will: [00:37:14] Oh, right. Well, that's where you should start. That's the, that's the, that's the kickoff point
Brad: [00:37:17] But, but you've, you've started doing some actual creative stuff and like, I really just wanted to like hear some cool ideas.
Can I, can I say the one that you told me about that I thought was super cool or should we save that.
Will: [00:37:26] Well, I was gonna talk about automations and scripts and scenes next, so we can just go right into it. Um, so, okay. So automation, scripts, and scenes. Kind of all work together, um, a scenes , and, and just to be clear, the automations are what differentiate home assistant from smart things and wink and home kit and all the other stuff.
Um, you can, you can do, like, you can have scripts that call each other and do all sorts of weird business and like they can talk back and forth. You can't really share variables between scripts and stuff like that. At least not without delving into Python. Um, but. It also, you can write Python scripts for this, if you, if you're a Python person and you want to get into that, you can do that.
Um, but so, um, automations make things happen based on something else happening. So you, you can set a trigger for example, uh, there's motion. On the motion sensor in my office, right? Oh, I should turn the lights on in the office. That's an automation. Um, you can also connect it to API is and triggered those, uh, those actions based on external APIs.
So, um, for example, I have mine hooked up to my Google calendar and my Twitch, uh, Twitch API. So when home assistant sees that my Twitch stream is live, it's like, Oh, he's probably at his office. I should turn the lights up to the stream setting
Brad: [00:38:42] Oh man that's, that's ridiculous,
Will: [00:38:44] Um, when, when I have a meeting, when there's a busy status on my calendar, it's like, Oh, I should turn the lights on so that the zoom call is properly lit.
Brad: [00:38:52] That is so damn cool. Oh, you know what, actually, I think like it detected my El Gato key light. I want to say
Will: [00:38:58] yeah, you can do that. That one's that one fires, you can do this.
Brad: [00:39:01] tell, tell that fucking bright ass light to come on in my face every time. It's time to stream.
Will: [00:39:05] Well, it's tricky for you cause you share a channel with a bunch of other people. So what would happen is like when Abby fires up the giant bomb account, your lights are going to be on full blast, which maybe is not desired.
Brad: [00:39:14] There's, there's probably a way for it to monitor like processes running on the machine and look for
Will: [00:39:19] A hundred percent.
Brad: [00:39:20] like straight up P ethic or something. Look for, look for a specific process to, to appear and then do it or whatever.
Will: [00:39:26] You can a hundred percent trigger that.
Brad: [00:39:28] So, so setting up, Oh, I'm sorry I was just gonna mention real quick. So like setting up automations is when I first had, it was when I had my first like kind of little magical moment with this thing of like, Oh, the potential of this is far greater than the commercial solutions have been using. Um, because I was setting all the automations up to just have lights come on at certain times.
That's what we did with home. And when I was setting up, uh, we have, uh, we have a little, it's a, an orange led light bulb in the bedroom. And one of the lamps, which has just a nice evening kind of nighttime light that we have have come on in the evening just to keep that room, uh, illuminated and throughout the year, or I would ride that automation and Apple home and like update it every two, three months as the length of days changed.
I was going to punch a time into the automation and home assistant and one of the options was just sunset or sunset with an offset. You know, it's like 15 minutes before sunset or after sunset. And I was like, Oh my God, like, this is going to be awesome.
Will: [00:40:18] Brad, here's a fun one. Uh, Homo my house, the, the West facing exposure for my house has a mountain on the South side of it. So the sun, that means the sun goes down an hour earlier in the winter time than it does in the summer. So you can just set it to like an angle above or below the horizon
Brad: [00:40:38] Yes. I saw that. I saw that you could literally punch in the
Will: [00:40:40] You can go to town with this.
Brad: [00:40:41] that's the what? That's not the
Will: [00:40:43] It's the sun, the integration
Brad: [00:40:44] What does, what does the, what is the term for what is asthma, asthma is something different,
Will: [00:40:49] As azimuth is the angle. I think, I can't remember. We're going to get this wrong.
Brad: [00:40:52] Yeah. That's why I'm afraid to mention it because I started looking stuff up after I saw this in home assistant and I don't know that I should do that. Here I am on the NOAA solar position calculator now, which is maybe beyond me. Um,
Will: [00:41:04] Look you're going to have to find this up in Kerbal to get a real understanding.
Brad: [00:41:07] Yeah totally, but, uh, like I should, I should mention like, yeah. The reason it knows sunset is because it's pulling in weather data.
So you could probably say like, Hey, turn on the lights or turn on whatever you have access to when it's raining outside, you know, or when it's below 50 degrees outside or in the house, or, you know
Will: [00:41:22] You can absolutely do that. And then, and you can also do like normal home, like home automation stuff. Like when I opened my back door, any of my exterior doors, the like the light, the outside lights that are next to those turn on, right. When somebody walks up to the front doorbell, which has a motion sensor, it turns on the front porch lights.
So like when the pizza guy comes, he's not standing out there in the dark. Um, all of that stuff is, is really convenient, but, but like really it's. The thing that is broader here is the ability to do things like hook up to your Google calendar and things like that, which smart things, A. I wouldn't give Samsung that access to data, but because it's running on a machine, that's inside my house and I'm the only one in charge of I feel okay about it.
Brad: [00:42:03] Yeah, I, I enjoyed when the, in the, of, in the very first page of the initial setup of this thing, they emphasize like, Hey, none of your data will be shared outside of the server. Like, like this is privacy is a major concern here. Um, it's got, uh, just real quick on it, like in that vein of trying to do to, if you're trying to, if you're really a DIY type and you're concerned about privacy and data and stuff like that, um, it's even got like an FFmpeg integration that can handle.
Webcams like, or, or security, security cameras, like I've, I've seen people talking about like, you can use like cheap raspberry pis and, and dumb webcams as security cameras that feed into this thing and
Will: [00:42:37] Well you can also buy IP. What are called IP cams that don't connect to a cloud service that then you just point those IPs at the things. I don't know how that would run on the raspberry PIs. Um, and also like you do want to minimize the rights that you do to SD cards. It's a good idea to buy app compatible SD cards, because they're set up for more writes, but like, you don't want to have logs on for this cause you'll burn out your SD card ur fast.
Brad: [00:43:00] Certainly. Yeah. If you were funneling footage to something, you would want to save it to an external drive, but
Will: [00:43:05] Yeah. This is a hard drive situation. Um, okay. So automations. They make things happen based on something else happening, based on a trigger, a scene, is just a collection of devices in a specific state. So if you think about, so, so basically if you're setting up an automation and you want the lights to be in like nighttime mode, when three different things happen, you can set up three automations and you can go in and manually select all of those items that you want to be that way.
Or you can make a scene that is the way you want those lights to be. When any of those three things happens and then make three automations that just say, Hey, call this scene.
Brad: [00:43:38] Yes.
Will: [00:43:39] When this happens.
Brad: [00:43:40] That exactly right. So like for example, I've got an led light strip on the back of my desk. Just kind of illuminates the, the wall
Will: [00:43:45] Yeah. Backsplash. It's nice.
Brad: [00:43:46] totally I'm like, I want that to come on in the morning at like a nice, very low brightness, like a nice orange, you know, something to wake up to.
Um, so yes, I made a scene that was like light strip on brightness, 5% orange, whatever hex code for the orange color or whatever, you know what I mean? And like, and yet, like you said, yes, then you can trigger that at any time. You can just say activate the scene instead of activating this device. And you can set that up for different colors or different States.
Will: [00:44:12] So, so now, but what if you wanted to make that light change, color temperature throughout the day, or like, uh, and, and go from like orange to blue and then back to orange, right? Yeah. So you would, instead of calling that scene, you would call a script, which is basically an automatic automation that happens independent of a trigger.
You don't need it. It's, it's triggered by something else, either manually by like a voice assistant call or by another automation. And, uh, so you would say, okay, over the next 10 hours, change this from this hex to this hex, to this hex
Brad: [00:44:47] with like a five minute increment or something like that or interval rather. Yeah,
Will: [00:44:51] Yeah. You'd have to do a little bit of math probably to figure it out.
Um, but yeah, and, and that's how that, like, basically that's how that would work. So things that I use. Um, so for example, uh, to go back one step for scenes, I have a scene for my office when it's empty. I have a scene from my office. Office when I'm working and I want it to be kind of dim, which is what it's on right now.
And then I have a scene for like eye blasting bright I'm I'm I'm shooting video in here. Um, you know, I have a scene for a dusk. When the, when it starts to get dark outside, I have a scene for after my daughter goes to bed. I have a scene for late night, like after 10 o'clock and then I have a scene, two different scenes for bedtime for like turning off all the lights in the house and turning off all the lights in my master bedroom.
So that like, if Gina, I go to bed in different orders, it works for either of us, no matter, no matter what, whether I'm in bed, reading a book and want the light on, or she's in the living room. And wants the lights on out there while I'm in bed and want the light off.
Brad: [00:45:48] So how do you write scripts? Do you have to write them from scratch? Like, is it a straight up text editor? Just like go, like, I assume that that's not, they don't really hold your hand for those. I assume
Will: [00:45:56] So you that if you want there's the, the script builder right now is one of the things I think is in pretty active development. And like, you can, I'm going to it right now, so I can see what it looks like. The last time I looked at it, it looked like a JV version of the automation builder. Yeah, which is what it is.
It's basically like the same as automation creator. If you get to a point where you can't do what you want to do with the creator, with the creator tool, you can just write straight code
Brad: [00:46:22] and what are you writing there? That's that's my real question.
Will: [00:46:25] it's a yaml. Or I think you can call Python scripts as well.
Brad: Okay, Okay
Will: Um, so things I use scripts for like, uh, it's another way to think of scripts.
Are they like scenes, but with logic. So, for example, I'll fire up. I have a script that when I want to like lay in bed and watch some star Trek the next generation, but I'm afraid I'm gonna fall asleep and don't want the TV going until three o'clock in the morning. I say, you know, okay, Google turn off the TV in a bit.
And it starts a script that runs for 30 minutes and kills the TV at that point after 30 minutes. And that uses a Roku integration. So it was really straightforward.
(google home) I can only help you with the first request.
Will: Go away, Google
Brad: [00:47:07] I've started starting to detect a downside to all of this home automation. I really hope that's picking up on your recording.
Will: [00:47:19] so, um, And then the last thing, the last big thing is the Loveless dashboards, the Lovelace dashboards. And that's the thing that you see on that overview page. It's the first thing it shows you when you connect? I think, uh, after you've set it up and the default one is computer controlled by the computer and basically has everything on it.
So you kind of want to leave that one alone. Um, you don't generally speaking, you don't probably want to start customizing these until you're pretty sure you have all of the devices you're going to want to put on, at least in the first, like, like with what you have right now, because, uh, once you customize a dashboard, you, it doesn't automatically add new stuff to it anymore.
So, um, but like I have a dashboard for Gina. That's just like the rooms and the lights and the speakers and the washer and dryer.
Brad: [00:48:09] Yeah. And there are mobile apps. We should point out there are iOS and Android apps that basically they basically just replicate the web interface as far as I can tell
Will: [00:48:18] Well, no, they also do. They also do presence. So they'll connect you to zone. Like you can get the zone information, like where your phone is. Um, either through the home assistant app or through Apple's iCloud implementation. I find the iCloud app implementation to be really fucking annoying if you have two factor on for your iOS, for your iCloud account.
So I disabled it and turned it off entirely. Uh, and I only do, uh, the, the home assistant configuration now.
Brad: [00:48:47] Yeah, but I, I mean, as far as the onscreen interface, it basically is the web interface. So what I mean is any custom,
Will: [00:48:52] the same thing. You see the same thing.
Brad: [00:48:54] Any customization you do on dashboards on the web interface will show up in the apps as well.
Will: [00:48:58] That’s right and I think in the app, you can say which dashboard you want to see by default too, which is nice. Um, so there's stuff you should know, like this is, this is the stuff that is important. We talked about reloading. Anytime you write a new script or add a new automation or add a new scene. Yeah. Or, um, change an area, changes, zone, change, a person, change a user.
Any of that stuff, you got to reload the appropriate part. And if you don't know which part to reload, just restart the restart, the home assistant application, which is in configuration server controls restart simple
Brad: [00:49:30] Well, not that far. Not that it's not, it's not that slow. If you're on a reasonably fast PI it only takes a few seconds for me.
Will: [00:49:35] Well, if you reboot the pi, it takes a long time. If you restart the server, it just takes a minute.
Brad: [00:49:40] yeah. That's what I mean.
Will: [00:49:41] Yeah. Um, if you're going to do this and you want it to work, when you're on your phone, away from the house, you need to have dynamic DNS set up. Um, there's a ad-on in supervisor that is called duct DNS.
That will do that. It'll generate it. Let's encrypt SSL certificate, the whole thing it's free
Brad: [00:50:01]I didn’t know they integrated all that stuff in there. That's great
Will: [00:50:02] Yeah, it's fabulous. Um, and it took like, that took like 20 minutes to set up. It was really easy.
Brad: [00:50:06] Yeah. So essentially you would forward ports or a port probably to,
Will: [00:50:10] You forward one port and then
Brad: [00:50:12] to the machine that, that it's running on. And then, yeah. And you've got a domain you can access externally or, or, you know, if like, if you've got a VPN set up, like I do, you can just VPN and get to it that way as well. Yeah,
Will: [00:50:21] the benefit of not the benefit of doing the dynamic DNS versus the VPN is that anytime the VPN isn't active, you won't get notifications, but if you do the DNS, the dynamic DNS thing, you will, um, The voice assistant integrations are challenging. So there's two iOS integrations for Apple users.
One is, um, one is the iCloud one that I said before, which is bad. If you use two factor, the other is home kit, which it'll detect. If you have iOS devices on your network. Um, the HomeKit one is great. It gives you Siri support on your devices. You'll have to go in and manually configure. And this is one of the places that, that, um, if you have a lot of devices, especially you can go into the configuration Yammel and limit the devices, the types of devices that are exposed to any integration.
So for example, like I don't need to show all my Google speakers to Siri. To home kit. So you can just say, okay, I only want, I only want these, this, these specific categories of devices. I want automations and scripts and switches and sensors, but I don't want, since I'm not doing any logic in home kit, I don't have motion sensors or anything like that.
Showing up in a home kit. Um, In order for you to use it with Siri, it has to be exposed to the home kit integration in the configuration dot yaml. Um, the other voice assistant integrations. If you want to do them are a hassle. Uh, you have to set up a developer accounts for Amazon and Google. Uh, you have to create some like private apps and there's, the documentation was really good.
And if you follow it exactly, it works. It works. I've done it twice. Now it worked both times really easily, but it is, it was time consuming. And you have to have dynamic DNS cause the, the, the apps that you create in Amazon and Google's cloud respectively have to be able to talk to your device. So, um, like, and, and also the Google one, it seems like maybe, you have to log into that console every 60 days.
That's unclear to me cause I, I, anyway, it's not great. You can also pay the developers of home assistant five bucks a month. Cause they provide home assistant cloud for that, which also supports the project as a whole. So if you don't want to fool with that, you don't have to, you just, you're going to go from, you know, you you're paying somebody and the data is then leaving your house a little bit. Um, there's some stuff that's still janky. Like I can't get Sonos to play a Spotify playlist, no matter what I do,
Brad: [00:52:46] sure.
Will: [00:52:47] like I can do local playlist. I can do like all sorts of other players play playlist, but no, no Spotify.
Brad: [00:52:53] That lets you know, that that's open source projects that's to be expected. Something's always going to be a little bit off.
Will: [00:52:59] That's true. That is true.
Brad: [00:53:00] I have a couple of iDevices plugs that I could not get added under their integration until I did a couple of factory resets on them and had to add them back to her home again first.
And then they find they they're just throwing a generic error that I could not figure out.
Will: [00:53:12] that like the, you know, where to find the errors is one of the big challenges of this. Cause there's like a lot of different logs. And like, if you're using Z-Wave and ZigBee devices, ZigBee devices, then those logs are in a different place than. Um, like the normal home assistant log. Cause like it's, it's, it's a lot.
Brad: [00:53:32] The error in the web UI on those, I think quite literally included language along the lines of, we don't know what happened. And then I looked in the console on the PI and there was a much more detailed error messages that actually implied some information there.
Will: [00:53:44] Yeah. It's um, especially when you're setting it up, it's really helpful to go ahead and set up SSH, which I think you can do in the ad-on store in the supervisor. Yeah, there's a terminal and SSH client that puts a terminal plugin on your left menu bar, but also lets you SSH into the , like it lets you set up the stuff to SSH into the device, which is really handy.
Brad: [00:54:05] Yeah. Most things of this nature, like some baseline Unix slash Linux experience is very helpful,
Will: [00:54:12] if you, uh,
Brad: [00:54:15] It’s not required, but like, it can come in handy when you're trying to troubleshoot and stuff like that.
Will: [00:54:18] If something goes real wrong. Yeah. Um, one of the other nice things about the supervisor plugin is it lets you create snapshots of configs when things are working well.
Brad: [00:54:28] Oh, okay. That's that's good to know. I was going to ask even, even separate from the supervisor, is there just an easy way to export your config? Just to be safe? Like, is it, is there a single Yammel you can pull out of there and just back it up
Will: [00:54:38] there's a bunch of Yamls . I
Brad: [00:54:40] I was afraid of that.
Will: [00:54:41] I don't know. Cause like in the old days when it was just the Yaml files yes. You could just copy the Yaml files and it would just know what to do now. I don't know what happens to all that. And that's one of the, that's one of the it's on my, I've got to figure this out before something goes wrong with this thing.
List. Um,
Brad: [00:54:59] that's probably pretty easy to Google like. Surely somebody in their community has addressed that in a guide or something
Will: [00:55:03] I would hope so, but, um, I
Brad: [00:55:05] is a lot of setup to have to do again. If something were to go wrong, if your SD card died or something like that.
Will: [00:55:10] I, yeah, I mean, I'm going to make sure that this is really well backed up, back, backed up after I get everything working the way I want it
Brad: [00:55:17] Where's the, you could do the same thing I do with my other pies on just to image that SD card and back that up.
Will: [00:55:21] That's true. Um, there's there's um, okay, so there's a few things to know as you're transitioning that I learned the hard way. Um, one is that before you disconnect your old hub, if you're using Z-Wave devices, especially. Use the Z-Wave exclude feature on the old hub, which will make the new Z-Wave.
The Z-Wave devices much easier to pair with the new devices. It's really important if you're using Z-Wave secure or whatever their encrypted thing is. Cause they, they don't, they, you might end up with like an orphan device that you can't unpair. If you don't do the exclusion first
Brad: [00:55:55] Yeah. Yeah. There's, there's a bunch of little gotchas like that. Like those iDevices plugs. I mentioned there no way to add those to your wifi without adding them in home. That's the only way that you can tell it what the SSI ID and password are.
Will: Oh god
Brad: So you have to add those to home. You have to, like, I literally did and have a home anymore because I had deleted it because I was getting off that platform and I had to go make a new one.
And add those back through that app just to get them on my wifi. And then you have to remove them from home and then home assistant can see them, blah, blah, blah. they're like, depending on your devices, there may be some hoops you're going to have to jump through. And some, some things to take note of.
Will: [00:56:25] One of the things I'm going to add to this list of best practices is don't turn off the don't like don't kill the old hub until you have the new thing working. Um, cause A. stuff like that happens where you have to have the old hub to disassociate the old devices or set up the new, set them up with a new account.
But B it's also really convenient to look at like timings on automations and stuff like that on the old one. Before you move everything off, um, uh, start, I said this before, but start with one room. That'll be easy and use that to learn all the weirdness about how the automations work and the scripts.
And like, when you want automation, when you want a scene, when you want a script, all that stuff. Um, remember, uh, did, if you, Oh, right. Um, So the devices that use ZigBee and Z-Wave and connect, communicate directly with the old hub will stop working with the old hub when you move them off. But devices that use APIs connect like Phillips hue and the Lutron stuff and Sonos, and all of these other ones will continue working with both hubs.
So it can make troubleshooting automation problems really weird, cause like they're, they're fighting with each other for control over the, over the devices. Um,
Brad: [00:57:39] that, that leads me to something quick I wanted to touch on. And this is, you know, this is only relevant for some people, if you're coming from Apple home, like I was, but so this thing accomplished my goal of just make all our damn devices work on one platform consistently and make it so that we can both me and my girlfriend can access them, blah, blah, blah.
And don't kill my iPad battery. Right? Like that's all I cared about. But, um, there is a God, is it? I think it's the home kit bridge is the one I'm thinking of here
Will: [00:58:01] Yeah, HomeKit bridge is.
Brad: [00:58:03] home kit controller is how you add HomeKit devices to. Home assistant home, home kit bridge then exposes all those devices.
You've added to home assistant back to the home app on iOS. Does that make sense? So,
Will: [00:58:17] So you shouldn't need, Oh yeah, you might need the home kit itself. So I don't have any home kit, pure home kit devices. So I haven't had to use those.
Brad: [00:58:25] yeah, we've, we've got it. We've got a decent number of those, but, but the, the point is, um, Uh, using that HomeKit bridge adds all those devices back into the home app, which makes them show up in like control center as nice little shortcuts, just to talk about stuff on and off. So it's a nice way to like, replicate that user experience for my girlfriend and not make her deal with the home assistant app.
Will: [00:58:43] Well, so I was going to say the neat thing about, uh, the neat thing about the way this works is if, once you get everything set up, right, you can control exactly what gets exposed back on that HomeKit bridge using the Yammel file. And, uh, you can even like go all the way down. So like, W with smart things.
I was able to never able to get the same automations working on Google. So like if I wanted to make the, the, my daughter's bedroom getting into time for her to go to sleep mode, I had to do that on Alexa, but like going to bed was on Google because there's an Alexa near her bedroom and there's a Google in our bedroom.
So now I have the same, automation's going to all the same places in the same trigger phrases are on everything. And it means that it's much, much simpler to answer more straightforward to use. Now, um, the, the, the, you get the same benefit that you're talking about with the Google, with the Apple home stuff with the Google home, sorry, Google assistant integration.
If you set that up or use the home assistant cloud,
Brad: [00:59:42] Yeah, I would, I would assume that exists for probably most of the major platforms that you can essentially kind of re-expose all this stuff back out to those, to those interfaces.
Will: [00:59:49] it depends, but yeah, like, like for example, you can do things like I have an automation set up now that talks to our LG washers that when the laundry's done it, it says on the Alexa, in the living room and the Google speaker in the dining room, Hey, the laundry is done. Right. And it can like, you can flash the lights and do all sorts of stuipd stuff
Brad: [01:00:11] Oh, that's cool. So that reminds me of the last thing I wanted to mention is that we didn't actually talk about your project that had wow’d me so much,
Will: [01:00:18] Oh, yeah. It ended up being really annoying. So I turned it off.
Brad: [01:00:20] Ah, okay. Then maybe nevermind. But, um, and, and this is very much a California Northern California thing right now.
Will: [01:00:27] It think it’s the entire West. I think we can say maybe even, maybe even like Western Eastern Australia too probably is impacted.
Brad: [01:00:32] increasingly more, more of the globe is dealing with air quality issues and, and, and raging wildfires.
Sure. Yeah. Pollution is all over the place. It's just going to be more anyway, you, you tied a, uh, I don't know what kind of light bulb it was, but one of the led types that can change colors into the air quality index. Data feed
Will: [01:00:49] I. There's this, there was a script that somebody wrote. Um, I sent you the link to it earlier, but, uh, let me, uh, we'll, I'll put it in the show notes. Uh, there's a script that somebody wrote that basically, um, some guy named Ben, uh, basically lets you sync the air quality color index. So like green is good.
Yellow is okay. Orange is bad. Red is don't go outside.
Brad: [01:01:13] purple is put on a hazmat suit.
Will: [01:01:16] right. Like hope you have a bunny suit to an RGB light in home assistant. And I did that while the fires were bad here. Cause it was kind of nice to know
Brad: [01:01:24] That's awesome
Will: [01:01:25] whether you need to put a mask on
Brad: [01:01:26] Yeah, because we were checking that thing a dozen times a day or more easily. Yeah, totally.
Will: [01:01:31] Um,
Brad: [01:01:32] So just being able to glance at a light and see what color it is and know how the air is outside is pretty cool.
Will: [01:01:36] I ended up turning it off. Cause like when it's green, like green, a, the hue bulbs that I was using don't do green particularly. Well. Um, so you couldn't kind of tell if it was green or yellow. Uh, but B I, it, we stopped needing it, so I
Brad: [01:01:52] it was just green, green, green, most of the time at that point. But, but it is a good little example of some of the cool creative ideas you can do with this thing.
Will: [01:02:00] Like, I mean, we said this before we talked about home home automation stuff. It's not something anybody needs, I mean,
Brad: [01:02:07] I was going to, the other guy had that idea several times during this conversation.
Will: [01:02:10] I mean, that's not true when my daughter was very young and we were walking, like we were, you're constantly carrying a child, being able to have lights come on in a room without having to touch anything. It was often very Val, you know, cause you have one hand at best. If you're, if you're, if you have disabilities, I can definitely see the benefit of being able to do a lot of this stuff by saying things rather than having to hit something.
Um,
Brad: [01:02:35] By and large, it's a convenience thing, not a necessity, but like, you know, like having that, that little orange lamp in our bedroom come on, tracked, tracked with the sunset every day of the year, or never have to touch that again is pretty nice little convenience.
Will: [01:02:47] It's it's fun and it's convenient. And the funny thing is. Like I started out doing this in an and the, the transition with Gina was from this thing is annoying. It never works to when we added the voice assistance, she was like, Oh, okay. This is kind of useful. I get it too. When things just started happening without having to think about them, when you go, like when we go visit my parents and they just have light switches, a my daughter was really excited cause she'd never really gotten to use a light switch before.
Um, but B it feels archaic to walk into a room and not have the lights. Be ke what you want to do, what you want them to
Brad: [01:03:24] that's, that's how, you know, you're living in the future.
Will: [01:03:26] Yeah. Um, so, but it's still, it's a hobby thing. It's not something that you absolutely have to do
Brad: [01:03:31] Yeah. So it was a fun tinkering project. If you're into that kind of thing,
Will: [01:03:35] And I think total spend, so it would have been 50 or a hundred bucks to buy a new, smart things. Hub. I paid 30 bucks for the raspberry PI and I think 40 bucks for the dongle. Um, so it's like a little bit more, but I'm not paying a monthly fee. So I figure it's probably okay. Um, and if you have questions, I guess, post them in the discord.
Uh, yeah, that's it. That's what I got.
Brad: [01:03:59] we need to, we need a home automation channel.
Will: [01:04:02] I mean, We kind of, I mean, let's see, let's see where this takes us.
Brad: [01:04:06] Yeah, we're adding, adding, adding channels at a pretty good clip. There's probably two or two
Will: [01:04:10] Were adding people at a pretty good clip too.
Brad: [01:04:12] fair. There's probably two or three places that that would sit already. But
Will: [01:04:15] like, I, I feel like it lives often in just network things or Linux talk, no kink shaming. Um, but speaking of the discord, if you would like to get access to the fabulous tech pod discord, full of brilliant people like, uh, you and, and the other 1300 people in there, 1,280 people in there, um, we would love to have you, you can do that by going to patrion.com/techpod.
That's patrion.com/techpod. Uh, and it's two bucks a month to get access to the discord, which, uh, a helps support the podcast and be ensures that the people that joined the podcast are joined. The discord are, uh, you know, they're not rap scallions.
Brad: [01:05:02] No, definitely not. There's there's so much great stuff on there. Hi, the other day, there was an amazing moment where a very delightful Canadian member of the discord was telling everyone about his internet trashcan.
Will: [01:05:14] What, I missed this.
Brad: [01:05:15] You should really scroll back and find that internet trashcan conversation.
Will: [01:05:19] Hold on. You got,
Brad: [01:05:20] I don't, I don't want to, well, I don't
Will: [01:05:22] Oh, okay.
Brad: [01:05:22] to spoil it, but it's, it's a, it's a classic looking metal trashcan that actually houses some raspberry pis and a lot of other cool sensor type stuff, doing all kinds of things.
Will: [01:05:31] That sounds awesome.
Brad: [01:05:33] it's a pretty ambitious project that you should look at it.
And it's pretty neat.
Will: [01:05:36] Um, I've had extended conversations about, uh, low-latency monitors and peaker's advantage. We talk about Hades and the Hades appreciation slash gaming channel. Um,
Brad: [01:05:49] and they're, they're just, they're continued to be a lot of people in there that work in very advanced high-tech fields that have a lot of very specific and high level knowledge about things that is just super fun to talk to.
Will: [01:06:00] Yeah, I would like to talk to some of them on the show. I feel like that may be weird, but, uh, I think we're going to do it anyway. Um, so yeah, if you want to join, you can do that at patrion.com/techpod. If you sign up for a few bucks a month more than that, then you get access to the Patriot exclusive episode, which comes out once a month.
And we have to record sometime in the next couple of days, I guess. Uh, I think this month, we're going to talk about the Stephen King short story. The Jaunt
Brad: [01:06:22] We gotta talk about The Jaunt. Talk about the w when you read The Jaunt and told me you read The Jaunt, I've almost wanted to record that podcast. Right, right then and there,
Will: [01:06:29] I wish we had now, that would have been really smart
Brad: [01:06:31] while it was fresh in your mind. But, uh,
Will: [01:06:33] I can read it. It's short. I'll read it again. Um, But yeah, that's it. Uh, and as always, we need to support our patrons. We need to thank our patrons, the people who make the show possible. So, uh, thanks to all 1200 it's 1,235, uh, patrons, but, uh, very special, thanks to our executive producer level patrons, Andrew Cotton, David Allen and Jacob chapel, uh, as well as, since it's the end of the month.
Uh, thanks to our. Associate producer level patrons. Arthur keys. Ben Gomi uh, Dan Brockman, Dave Julian, Grand banks, Jacob w Jan Rita, Terry Cox, the buddy fiend TA and Thomas Shea. Thank you all so much.
Brad: [01:07:13] Thank you. I'd like you to add to everybody who supports us for sure. I just thought what it was was the number 12. I've kind of sit here and say thank you
Will: 1235.
Brad: Okay. All right, here we go. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I don't have enough fingers cause it's pretend
Will: [01:07:28] You got it. You got it. You got like 1,230 to go.
Brad: [01:07:31] lot of engineers around here.
Just thank you to asterisk. 1235.
Will: [01:07:34] Okay. I feel like that was the cheat. Well, w the next month patron episode is Brad going down the list and thinking every single patron by name
Brad: [01:07:41] I just write a little shell scripts,
Will: [01:07:45] we can export the CSV.
Brad: [01:07:46] parcel. There's some data out of, yes.
Will: [01:07:48] I do have that voice generator. So, yeah, that's it. Uh, if you'd like to support the P the show again, it's patrion.com/tech pod. I, my favorite part of the day is when I have a moment and can dip in, and usually I just pick a random channel and see what people are talking about. And it's always something fascinating.
Like there's a keyboard channel. We got, uh, just general maker stuff. The food channel is, is if you'd need recipe ideas, man. Getting that food channel, um, is very good.
Brad: [01:08:19] If you want to talk about work,
Will: [01:08:20] Yeah,
Brad: [01:08:21] people request a work and career stuff kind of channel, and now we have it
Will: [01:08:26] there you go. It's all in there. Uh, and we would love to see you, uh, wonderful people in there as well. I guess that's it for us? This week Brad
Brad: [01:08:33] Yeah. Thanks everybody for listening.
Will: [01:08:34] We'll see you all. Uh, next week on another episode of the tech pod. Bye.