Choosing a smart home hub
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- Опубліковано 3 лют 2023
- Every smart home needs a brain, or a hub, which all your smart devices connect to and that controls your home automations.
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In this video I explain why I've chosen Home Assistant to be the brains of my smart home and show you how you can get up and running with Home Assistant in your own home using a Home Assistant Yellow.
Links:
Buy Home Assistant Yellow: www.crowdsupply.com/nabu-casa...
How to get help with Home Assistant: • Get help with Home Ass... - Навчання та стиль
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As someone new to smart homes and assistants. I love when I can see what people are doing, and how they set them up.
This is definitely making me consider the HA Yellow kit, as there are just too many hubs to buy and it will save me on energy costs with hosting HA on a PC or Server. Thanx for the great content. I cannot afford the network kit you installed, but I managed to do the exact same thing you did, by fixing up my internal network first, then starting on adding automation devices. 👍
I started learning home assistant in July 2022. I have invested around two months in learning, reading and experimenting before I got to a level where I could feel comfortable about using it and make it available for my family, but I feel it was worth it, because it expanded my mind and understanding on how home automation works and what happens under the hood.
It is not an understatement that Home Assistant is complex and has a steep-ish learning curve. Maybe this was because I chose to learn alone. But if you have a friend already using it, go ask for explanation. Home Assistant has some quirks and pitfalls of which once you are aware of, everything goes much, MUCH faster.
I'd also suggest joining the community in Discord, or Reddit or the HA community forums. I learn a lot by reading about what other people are doing.
Can't wait to see the progress. Great videos and are very informational. Thank you!
So impressed by the way you explain all this in a simple way to us new smart home folk, just about to move home myself so taking away advice to help set up, it all started witha light bulb, literally! looking forward to following for more. Cheers!
Glad it was helpful!
Awesome tips as always!
Thanks for sharing!
People should know that while your local network doesn’t make a smart home, you can’t have a smart home without a top notch network.
That's the truth!
Pearls of wisdom ..
Alan, I must say I really enjoy your playlist. The professionalism and no-nonsense approach is great. There is a lot of noise out there on smart homes (mainly coming from America where brands differ and constraints vary). Thank you so much for taking the time uploading this. I wish there was a way to support your channel (maybe there’s is but couldn’t find it so please drop me a line if there is). G
Thank you! Comments, likes and subscribes are the only support I'm looking for right now. I just make these videos as a hobby alongside my day job, sharing what I learn with others
I didn‘t know HA yellow or nabu casa. Thanks for presenting them.
I just moved into a house with 3 floors and five rooms. This video was very good so you've got a new subscriber!
I plan to use Home Assistant to control 5 Gree Wifi enabled Air Conditioners, 7 ceiling fans and 6 standing fans, for sensors it will be Xiaomi temperature and humid sensors in every room and the common areas (12 sensors!), some Sonoff wifi switches and sensors, door sensors (4 or 5). Plus indoor and outdoor cameras.
I'm really enjoying this series, and I think it's not often that someone gets a new house to be able to set up a new automation platform. That's awesome. Something about automations: A pattern I use is to set the same thing on the "trigger" and "condition". This way you can be sure that any change will trigger the automation, but the condition can check things via AND and skip the automation. It also means you can set "coincident" triggers -- triggers which might co-incide with the automation, but do not affect the condition.
The aim there is to be able to trigger an automation at any time, but it having a set of conditions which prevent it running to keep it in a safe state.
Instead of having to run concurrent automation's you might check out the action called choose. It can check the conduction and if it doesn't pass it will go on to the next option you set up in the automation that has a different conduction. You can have as many options as you want and can even setup a default action if none of the option conduction's are true. All in one automation. Very nice, i use this a LOT when setting up actions that may have many different conduction's.
@@HATipsByLarry Yes! I do the same thing. Basically I can have a single automation to set a device to a desired state, and I can choose which state to set it to based on the conditions. Then I just set the trigger to whenever I want to ensure the state is set.
Do you also thin electric cars can be smart charging
The Homey Pro for the win! 1 Epic Hub that works with everything.
Home assistant for a beginner is an utter nightmare. I’ve wasted so many hours trying to get it working and keeping working. I feel like everyday something stops working or it needs restarting.
Going to wait for matter hubs, probably the SmartThings and go back to basics.
Thanks for this video, i am trying to DIY my home
All the best with it! It's a fun project
As an embedded/HPC software developer HA is a complete horror show (ie: don't look at the code kids!). But I have to admit, despite it's Rube Goldberg'esque way of functioning, it's probably one of the best out there.
You crucially forgot to mention that the Nabi Casa has an annual subscription cost. Key bit of info.
Thanks for such an informative video.
Could you plz do a video on how to connect a Bluetooth speaker and play audio thru it using homeassistant supervised or hassio. Plz consider the request 🙏.
Thanks for the great video! I just subscribed to your channel. I'm brand new to home automation and looking at Home Assistant Yellow. All of the options include this statement: "This kit includes everything in the flagship version except the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4." This is confusing me, because I thought one of the benefits of Yellow was not having to get a separate Raspberry Pi. It'd be great if you could tell me which Yellow option you'd recommend for a total "newbie".
Like you, I've just bought a house and will be setting up a smart home. I am new to this game so ordered the yellow kit with PoE. Just wondering now if I should have bought the standard yellow kit instead. This is all so new. Hope you don't mind questions. X
Hi very good video to start home automation. Like to buy the home asssitant yellow. But on the given link will have many option which one to choose
Hi, could you please send the information regarding the Bluetooth dongle you use with HA Yellow? REgards, Great videos.
Home assistant is kinda more than a hub. It's the super-hub. Such a hub that you can add other hubs to it as integrations and add-ons and you're back to having just one app. I can operate my ring alarm through home assistant faster than the ring app can even start.
5 hubs?! I have 2 if I decide to use the second. And just got home assistant green!
What i know about "smart" home and "home automation" is dangerous and frankly quite intimidating. I've been an enterprise level technician for over 2 decades so networking and I.T is nothing new to me. I'm currently dedicating a large percentage of my free time to researching cutting ties with big tech like Microsoft, Google and Amazon to name a few. I like my privacy way too much to just hand it over free of charge. It's for this reason home automation scares me. I was always under the impression that you needed one of the affore mentioned products to make it all work. But what ive learned recently is that this is not the case and THAT is a good thing! I will be following this series very closely to see where it takes me in my persuit of home automation. Thanks so much 👍😎
Absolutely, Home Assistant is such a breathe of fresh air in this market where everything requires accepting a privacy policy and sending data to who knows where in the cloud.
@@HomeAutomationGuy oh absolutely this new attitude of "not owning anything and accepting it" or "everything as a service" is really aggrevating to say the least. Its time we start taking our lives back by using opensource and self hosting. Thank you so much for your contribution. Keep up the great work.
👍 Nice discussion of Home Assistant! Hope you're planning a follow-up video about the infrastructure you're using to support the platform in your new home. Still using Docker for everything? Also intensely curious about the teaser short you posted last year about your early Christmas present to yourself. Do tell!!! 😁
Seems like he's got a Yellow? So, no more docker, a dedicated device.
@@TomasIgnatavicius I think he highlighted the Yellow only as a relatively straightforward and inexpensive way one can acquire a simple, ready-to-go hub for Home Assistant (particularly since these days, DIY on a Raspberry Pi isn't that easy due to supply constraints). It almost certainly would not have the power or scalability to handle his extensive and complex setup. For reasons he explained in some depth, at his previous residence he had set up a Docker-based environment (on Debian, IIRC) for hosting Home Assistant as well as a plethora of related monitoring and management functions, and I'm curious whether he'll be staying on the same platform after his move, or if he's migrating things to Proxmox, as he might have hinted in his video from a month ago. More than any other UA-camr whom I follow, his home automation rationale and goals most resonate with mine, and therefore I pay close attention to his explorations, observations, discoveries, and methods.
Can you make a video tutorial about the Dashboard for each user and have different permissions, meaning that a specific Dashboard appears for each user and the user can only edit it through the admin?
Hey HomeAutomationGuy 😁 love your videos .. I’m new to the smart home world and I’ve been watching your content and educating myself on the best one for me - going with ZHA. I wanted to find out if the Zigbee dongle can be placed anywhere in the house or just it be physically connected to the Raspberry Pi? I want to put the RPi in my study (where all my other gadgetry sits) and wall plug the dongle in a more centralised area in the (ideally this would wirelessly connect to the RPi) 😊 I hope this makes sense and you can help..
It needs to be physically connected to the RPi unfortunately.
What about homey? According to their website and some reviews it's pretty similar to HA but easier, expensive, and very user-friendly. What are your thoughts?
HA lord of the Hubs one Hub to rule them all!
Wooooo! Yes!
Love this solution but unfortunately the brain of the module the Raspberry CM4 is almost impossible to find. Suggestions.?
I started my smart home journey with HA yellow 3 months ago. It's crucial to communicate that HA doesn't always give you full access to end device functionality so buyer beware when selecting devices to purchase.
Yes, with some best-of-breed devices/systems functionality is exposed only through an app and/or hub. Lutron Caseta is one example. That's why it's really important to think about and document your requirements before you begin spending your budget on the often-expensive bits, lest you paint yourself into a corner. And that's what makes this channel and others so valuable, with someone like HAG thoughtfully presenting objectives and solutions.
Thank you!
My wifi router is downstairs, so the nabu casa will need to sit alongside it. Will the nabu casa be able pick up the signals from my devices upstairs (I live in a 2 storey house) or will I need to install another hub upstairs?
Hi Home automation guy. Ther is de e problem with home assistant ZHA that still makes it necessary to have a second Hub. All low energy zigbee devices (without battery ) are not supported. Many expensive zigbee switches therefore still need another Hub. An example of a not supported switch is friend of hue. A second older deconz dongle in your home assistance hub can solve this problem but will lead to two zigbee networks in your house
I have an old Zigbee heating system that is unsupported by ZHA. Is there anyway to access it or is it a lost cause? Thank you.
Does home automation support Kasa? I have a lot of switches that are Kasa used with my Alexa. I want to get away from the problem I have when the internet goes down.
One question that pops up every time Home Assistant is mentioned: did you look at the OpenHAB alternative, and if so, why did it end up not being your choice?
cooooool
Do you think there is no benefit whatsoever in running both the native hubs for a product AND HA? I find creating nice effects with my Hue gradient strips is far easier in the Hue app than in HA. I'm torn - I am about to set up a new home with 200+ Hue lights and accessories and have 5 hubs ready to go along with a mini PC running HA.
Any tips on finding a Compute Module 4?
What happens when for example a Hue light is already been paired to a hub before? Does Home Assistent still find it?
I use an Intel NUC NUC6CAYH with Home Assistant OS. The NUC has more capacity and power than the Home Assistant Yellow, which also makes the hub a bit more future-proof. I use only two hubs, the NUC with Home Assistant and the Aqara M1S, the rest runs on a Zigbee stick with Zigbee2mqtt. So far I have to say it's the most stable hub I've ever had. I can even use the integrated Bluetooth interface for BLE, and the WLAN as failover.
I can see your point about the stability of a NUC, but unless your Zigbee stick is a fairly recent model with the same chipset as what the HA Yellow and Skyconnect have, you don't have an out of the box option for Thread/Matter.
@@MatthewN8OHU Using SkyConnect with the NUC is nearly out of the Box option with Tread and Zigbee.
Hi HA Guy nice video but your blog page doesn't upload
Hi, congrats for your new apartment and good luck with these new series of videos, always following you with a close attention to your contents...
I have a question... how good it is the integrated zigbee antenna in home assistant yellow? Does it worth it? Or better continuing with sonoff zigbee and zigbee2mqtt? Thanks
If you already have the Sonoff Zigbee and Zigbee2mqtt then I would stick with that. You can upgrade to a Home Assistant SkyConnect USB stick later when it gets Matter/Thread support if you want to use those types of devices then too
@@HomeAutomationGuy thanks for your answer. Actually I have a similar case to yours, current renting apartment with homeassistant installed on rasp pi4, sonoff and zigbe2mqtt, without really investing more on network range, mesh or whatever....
Now in the new apartment we bought I wanted to restart fresh, so I was considering an all-in-one solution like homeassistant yellow, and using ZHA this time... do you think it makes sense for a fresh restart? In your case, how are you going to do? Thanks, cheers
@@VincenzoCasini If you were happy with the Pi 4, then I would stick with the Pi 4 that you are familiar with and already works. I would definitely start from scratch with the Home Assistant installation, as you will probably be naming things differently in the new apartment, and might change things based on any learnings you have from the old one. I would just reset Home Assistant back to fresh and start again on the hardware you have until you find it no longer is working for you.
Love your videos. Thanks for the trouble that you take. A question - I have a local automation company which is setting up wifi switches in my new home. It's called Buildtrack India. They are NOT integrated with Home Assistant but they are wifi based, so will I be able to use HA to detect them?
Sorry, I'm not sure. I would suggest checking the Home Assistant integrations page to see if they are supported.
does using a hub help free up wifi usage and not having 50 things connect to my network?
great video I dont have home assistance I have been using everything on smartlife where do I start I seen your done a video on the green home assistance can you help me where to start please? thank you Alan
I would start on the Home Assistant Green website, it has lots of instructions to get you up and running. Since you use Smartlife, you should be able to see the similarities and get familiar with it pretty quickly. Good luck with the journey!
Is Google nest max a zigbee hub aswell ?
What's about the prozessing power of HomeAssistant Yellow?
I run my HomeAssistant at the moment on my QNAP NAS in a virtual machine.
Would your recommend to switch to HA Yellow, and if so why?
I'm talking about prozessing power because of the future and possible plans with local text recognition for Assist.
It uses a Raspberry Pi CM 4 as the CPU/Main board. In your situation I'd totally stick with the VM solution, the Yellow is great for beginners who are just getting started with HA
I’ve heard hue bulbs are terrible zigbee routers so I’ve been using the hue bridge. Am considering switching them direct to zha though. What’s your experience with it?
I’ve got them in every room in my house and they’re the backbone of my zigbee network using zigbee2mqtt. I can’t say I have any complaints and it works very consistently for me.
Using a yellow now? Well I guess it was a good ride watching someone manage their smarthome with docker.
Docker is hidden under the hood of the Home Assistant OS and Supervisor.
I'm not personally going to use a Yellow. A lot of my new viewers are only just getting into HA so I wanted to show them the easy ways first. I'm personally going to look into the Virtualisation route this time, and run HA OS inside a VM, but still using Docker for things like Frigate and a few other services.
I personally loved running HA in Docker, but I feel like learning something new this time ;)
I clicked into the link you had in the description and it took me to Home Assitant Yellow. I looked through the buying options and it looks like you buy most of the things but you’d need to buy a raspberry pi cm4 separately. Is this any cm4 or is it very specific on which one to buy? I’d rather ask than buy the wrong one.
I buy the kit that comes with the CM4 and power supply. That way you can't mess it up!
How do you think using HA then lost some original features that only works with original hub such as AI detection on Aqara camera? I'm using Aqara hub for their devices and HA for other integration. If any key triggers from Aqara to HA needs, I make some switch for them to communicate. Of course, still many limitation but I dont want to lose some key features on original one.
It's a trade off that you have to make I guess. I have the same problem with some devices, and each time I have to make the decision if I am going to use it just in HA, or if I need to use the app/hub it comes with as well.
How long have you been using the hue devices without the hue hub? I heard that there is a bunch of limitations to not using the hue hub, also ZHA can't update the hue firmwares as far as I know.
I've been using the Hue devices without their hub for 3 years now without issue. I'm pretty sure ZHA can now update their firmware.
This is also super important as Hue is going to start forcing users of their hubs to sign up for cloud accounts 😞
Does this device use standard home assistant or some proprietary fork? Also is it the supervised version?
Standard Home Assistant, the supervised OS version. It's actually made by the creators of Home Assistant, so it will always follow best practices
What's home assistant running on?
So will you be using Home Assistant Yellow? Any input on performance once you have a couple of hundred devies?
Stay tuned to find out 😏
I’m also building a smart home and am wondering: are you providing wired power for all your sensors? I dont want to use batteries since I have the chance to wire them though haven’t figured out the best way to provide power yet.
Moat sensors aren't going to allow you to wire them for power. They are made to be small and easy to move to a location of your choose. My advice is don't limit yourself to a small group of wired sensors. There are several ways (blueprints, integrations, etc.) that will allow you to monitor your sensor battery state and replace them as needed.
@@HATipsByLarry we could also solder power wires to the battery connectors to provide power…seems like it’d be worth the convenience of not having to follow battery monitors and constantly switch out the batteries.
@@LinkSF1 while this would work, it's impractical in many situations. For example a door sensor would be difficult if not impossible to wire, a motion sensor that needs to be located on the ceiling or in a location that does not make it possible to wire it. inside a freezer or refrigerator (to monitor temperature and humidity) would be examples as well.
@@HATipsByLarry door sensors are pretty easy to wire if you haven't put on the drywall yet. Same for the ceiling sensor. Not sure I care to put one inside a fridge.
Hi, a question about matter.
I've been using this hue starter pack for years now (2 bulbs and the bridge) and recently, the smart home bug bit me and decided to expand. I set up HA and got me some smart plugs, but those are wifi, so didn't have an issue.
My next planned move is getting some zigbee thermometers and maybe some motion and contact sensors, so I was planning to buy a combee stick but... if matter is coming to the hue bridge, soon:tm:, Can I just wait for it to be implemented and use it as a bridge for aqara, etc? Or is that not how it works (matter hue bridge acting as combee stick for matter compatible products).
Thanks.
Unfortunately not, when the Hue Bridge gets Matter support, it's still just going to work with their own products. You'll still going to need the Aqara Hub for their respective products. The only positive thing is that you'll have the opportunity to then make like automations using all your devices together. But you'll still need each hub. That's why Home assistant is such a blast.
If you want to extend Home Assistant to manage Zigbee devices, consider a Home Assistant SkyConnect rather than a Conbee stick. In addition to a little more assurance that it'll be supported for longer, it'll be extended for Thread support, perhaps later this year, so a bit of futureproofing is built in as Thread begins displacing older connectivity protocols in new home automation devices.
As an IT / cloud / network engineer I disagree to some degree. A poorly designed/secured network will still work, it may even seem very fast etc.
The real issue in my eyes is that most people don't give their network security that much input... Many large companies don't provide WFH staff a separate WiFi point /router/firewall and then they use lots email and SMS based 2FA... Layering up on such issues will become a issue, it's just a matter of time.
"If you don't schedule maintenance for your environment, your environment will schedule maintenance for you". - Unknown
I love that scheduled maintenance quote!
Looking forward to using home assistant, still waiting to be able to buy a RPi 4 CM, they are as rare as hens teeth at the moment, so I'll maybe get to it at the end of 2023. 🤣
You may buy other tiny form factor older systems like optiplex or Lenovo tiny. They are faster and future proof compared to RasPi4
Seems impossible to source any cm4. So im abandoning HA for my new home and looking at Homey Pro instead.
Yeah, they're hard to find at the moment. But there are many other hardware options you can run HA on
I have a hub for hive, broadlink, sonoff, aqara. I have the HA yellow so can I now just turn off all those hubs?
You can turn off a lot of them. The Sonor and Aqara ones definitely, not sure about Hive or Broadlink - depends what you use them for.
Ordered my yellow back in Nov'22 and still eagerly waiting for it to arrive... Estimated in March 😒
Ordered mine in Aug 2022 due to ship Mar.
can you do a comparison whith the Homey Pro 2023 edition? would like your take on it. Aspesialiy as someone planning on my Smarthome
It looks pretty user friendly (UI seems similar to Home Assistants dashboards in fact).
If you want something that's prebuilt maybe it's a good option, but I can't find anything about the OS. Is it closed source? You can get Home Assistant for free on a Raspberry Pi and add some dongles for much cheaper and likely have more control over software. Or a Home Assistant prebuilt like the Yellow would still be cheaper.
It comes down to how much you want to do yourself. HA isn't that labour intensive but if you really want something preprogrammed but costs 3 times as much, maybe that's the one
@@Jmcinally94 from what I can find it ain't open source but open platform.
I have the Fibaro HC3 but willing to move to homey pro 2023
I am currently running HA on a NUC and use a Conbee II for Zigbee. Is there an easy way to move my configuration over to the Yellow or will I have to start from scratch?
If I were you I'd keep using the NUC. You're not going to get much benefit from the Yellow and you'll be able to upgrade your Conbee stick eventually to something else if you want to use Matter or Thread devices
The only thing I would come up with is power consumption. You totally can copy over your configstion but you'll need to repair all of your zigbee devices and either go sure they get the same names in zha than before in the deconz integration or you'll adjust every automation and dashboard mention of every device that changes its entity name.
Lots of manually work I suppose...
@@christophostermayer1694
Not anymore. There's a backup function in ZHA, letting you backup all your ZHA devices and restore them in a click.
@@JockeSwedenGeek yeah but not if you used the deconz integration before instead of zha, am I right?
@@christophostermayer1694 no, that's true, sorry. But next time you're safe:-)
Can this single hub cover all areas of the house?
Yes. Take a look at some of my Zigbee videos which show you how to create a mesh network that can span all over your house
I bought a smart home yellow and still waiting for it . Was supposed to get it in January now it's March and they said they don't think it will even come in March ....😞
😔 Yeh, there have been some delays shipping them out due to the difficulty in getting the components.
@@HomeAutomationGuy had to come back and mention I have received my home assistant yellow ! And I can't stop automating . Iv set up over 65 automations couple favorites are turning on and off my various alarms on my android (great if you don't have a steady schedule) and using actionable notification to ask me if I'm working tomorrow and if I do it sets my alarms for 6:30 am and if I reply no it cancels my morning alarm and let's me sleep in. The second automation I really love is the adaptive lighting integration from hacs. Love how all my light gets adjusted according to the time of day !
Matter is only on the hub? Well this video didn't age well. My Kasa Matter Smart Plugs beg to differ. Don't get me wrong. I still love Home Assistant but that statement about Matter not ruling them all falls flat on it's face today and so far I am loving the concept of Matter.
1:27 he did not said hub, he said hoob 🤣🤣
Technically Home Assistant is free because the creator of it allowed it to be free. It doesn't need to be open source to be free, as Google Home and Alexa software is technically free software too. You just pay for the hardware. I know, being a little pedantic there :).
Home Assistant is not just random due to Nabu Casa actually controlling the roadmap for Home Assistant. They control what gets added to Home Assistant. Although Home Assistant is open source, the official Home Assistant code has a defined roadmap and is controlled. That should eliviate concerns about just having a random direction. With that said, I'd actually like Home Assistant to do less releases, but with more accuracy. Having a patch every few days is not really great for what should be primarily set and forget. It makes Home Assistant more maintenance than it should be.
I am hopign Matter version 2 will be stricter on requirements for interoperability, but given it is the same companies that were the Zigbee Alliance before, I doubt it. Zigbee was supposed to be that unifying protocol when it was released, very similar marketing to Matter....
5 hubs ...in 1 house?! Haiyaaaaaa
Poor TechFlow 😂😂😂😂
first!
That's still a thing in 2023?
'promo sm' 💪
@marzbar referenced....