Book Image

Building Smart Home Automation Solutions with Home Assistant

By : Marco Carvalho
5 (1)
Book Image

Building Smart Home Automation Solutions with Home Assistant

5 (1)
By: Marco Carvalho

Overview of this book

Picture a home where you can adjust the lighting based on the time of day or when movement is detected. In this same home, you can also detect when a door is unexpectedly opened or an alarm is triggered in response to any suspicious activity. Such automated devices form part of a smart home, and the exciting part is that this book teaches you how to create and manage these devices all by yourself. This book helps you create your own ecosystem to automate your home using Home Assistant software. You’ll begin by understanding the components of a home automation system and learn how to create, hack, and configure them to operate seamlessly. Then, you'll set up Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi to work as a home automation server, build your own IoT sensors based on ESP32/ESP8266, and set up real-life automation use cases using hands-on examples and projects. The chapters will also guide you in using software tools such as Node-RED, InfluxDB, and Grafana to manage, present, and use data collected from your Home Automation devices. Finally, you’ll gain insights into new technologies and trends in the home automation space to help you continue with your learning journey. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to build your own creative, IoT-based home automation system using different hardware and software technologies.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Part 1: Introduction to Home Assistant – Installation and Configuration
4
Part 2: Install, Create, and Hack Sensors and Actuators
7
Part 3: Automations, Customizations, and Integrations Using Home Assistant
10
Part 4: Expanding Home Assistant’s Capabilities
13
Part 5: Learn by Doing and Future Trends

Managing your network of Tasmota devices using TasmoAdmin

If you plan to use Tasmota on many devices in your home as I do, the add-on that I will present in this section might be useful to you. It is called TasmoAdmin. This is used to manage devices such as sensors and actuators installed with Tamosta. It scans your network to find Tamosta devices, allowing you to see their status, configure them, and even send firmware updates over the air to one or more devices at once. TasmoAdmin is very handy for me when I need to configure something in particular on a Tamosta device and do not know the IP address it is configured for. It scans and finds the Tasmota device IP for me.

We will install TasmoAdmin with the same procedure used to install other add-ons. I will not repeat the installation procedure; instead, I invite you to try to follow the process presented in the previous sections to install the other add-ons. It starts the same way – looking for Settings | Add-ons.

After...