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

Customizing your dashboards

In this section, we will explore one of the most fun activities in this book, which is to customize some dashboards in Home Assistant. The dashboards will be where you will interface with your home, controlling actuators and verifying the status of the sensors, so this will need to be somewhat easy for you to access and manage. The views will be where you can see the cards and badges.

I will provide you with three main approaches to configuring your dashboards with different cards so that you can have an overview of the possibilities that can be used to interface with your home. These approaches are as follows:

  • By home dependencies: The by home dependencies dashboard approach will group devices and entities based on the dependencies of my home. Currently, I have eight dependencies with devices installed, so we will explore different cards that can better be reshown by this configuration.
  • By device type: The by device type dashboard approach...