Great tutorial for an old rookie. Seems like a lot of the recent UI changes have made a lot of the videos out there mostly obselete or at least confusing. This video is very helpful. You might want to add a video about labels and categories to help automation organized and multi- use.
The UI automation editor rocks! Automations built with it are typically correct by construction, with very little debug required. I originally used NodeRed for automations, and being a NodeRed newbie, was often frustrated when even simple automations would not work.
I just did something very similar but alarms drive my dogs crazy so I made certain lights turn red to alert us in addition to the phone notification and I also added in turning off the water to the house with a zigbee valve. Thanks for all the great content!
Couldn’t agree more on the forums, I ask a specific question, mention that I have read the pages and just don’t quite understand, and I get snotty responses or a simple link to the same pages I’ve already read 20 times.
Yep. That's what I see. Sad really. Because I feel like a lot of the community does want to be helpful. But that experience really hurts home assistant.
Hi Jeff, thanks for another great video. Have been using home assistant for a good few years but it’s no harm to go back to basics once in a while and see what’s new.
Thank you for your efforts and I was really looking for someone to explain it in details. Please consider similar videos for other kind of triggers and actions
I gave you a big thumbs up even though I didn't learn anything in this video mainly because the content is exactly what I would've liked to know. Although, I put Restart as the mode for all my automations. When turning lights on, it can feel laggy if you wanna turn them off, and they're still in a transition phase. Like if the motion sensor sees you, it waists for that to play out before letting you turn off the lights. I have motion sensors and button presses in the same automation, but when a button is pressed, it disables the motions sensors though a toggle and then turns the toggle back off when you press "Off" from a button. That way, I can keep the lights on when I'm in the room. With Restart, it lets some things immediately turn off. I have it set a timer to turn back on the motion sensors as part of a sequence in Actions. This is all super complex though. My latest idea is to have the button's "hold off" or just "hold" turn off motion sensors since the only way I have it setup to do that right now is when turning on the lights, and sometimes, I want them off, so I can make the lights brighter at night if I'm working on something. This is all stuff I'd love to see in a video because I think I'm doing it wrong. Lastly, I've been thinking hard about Scenes. I use them a ton with LIFX lights, but I'm buying other brands now and using Home Assistant for those. If a light goes bad, or I change it out, I have to remake the scene. It'd be great if I could create a script for each scene and then when I swap out a light, all I have to do is swap out the colors for that light in the script rather than going in the scene and trying to remember what I had them set to. Home Assistant has a lot of confusing things like this.
Yeah, I definately need to talk more about automations like this. I currently have a "light over-ride switch" that has to manually be turned on that disables the normal timer/motion based automations. Most of my lights have a timer where when the room is no longer occupied the lights turn off after x minutes. But in some places where I dont have good presence tracking like my wife's pottery studio, she can use a voice command "I am up to no good" and the lights will stay on until she issues the voice command "mischief managed" which just kicks off the timer to turn them off.
The use case for parallel is when you have multiple triggers like timing and and you set that at 7 should turn on the ac for 2 hours but at 8 you want to turn off a light you can put them together in one automation
@@SlackerLabs That makes two of us. A while ago, I even got involved in a social thread where I called out a LOT of the stuff that's holding them back from becoming a mainstream-accepted product. The result of that discussion was a large part of the motivation to start a channel trying to teach people about Home Assistant, since it was at that moment that it became clear to me that people would never be able to actually learn anything from the forums. We should do a live stream and have a conversation about it. LOL
Thanks! I noticed as I was editing I left some stuff out, but I need to do a followup to talk about the new labels so I'll try to add to this one with more.
So would I use automations to create an alias for a voice command? For instance, I can currently tell Alexa "turn off the entryway light" or "shut off the entryway light" and it works. I'm moving away from Alexa and using the new Assist, and it only understands "turn off the entryway light", if I tell it "shut off the entryway light" it doesn't understand.
I'm actually working on stuff for a video around that. But yeah. There is a "Sentence" trigger that you can specify your voice commands under. Then have it do something. There may be a way to have it translate that into "turn off the entity", but I have mine just call a script. That way the response can be read back by my current Jarvis voice since I only have one working Wyoming Satellite with open wake word running at the moment. But getting voice commands setup suing the automation was easier than I expected.
Try saying "{device name} off" so in your example "entryway off". Btw, with assist you might be able to add (multiple) aliases to devices and say that instead.
Hi Jeff - There have been so many changes over the last 12 months, it's difficult to get yr head around it and keep up to be honest. Some things are changed- without any pre warning or firm instructions what to do. Honestly they seem at times, beyond mere mortal long standing HA users.. even seasoned programmers! (see below!) So my question is this. Is there anybody offering a paid service to log in (securely of course!) repair, spruik and clean up a HA project? Thanks!
So when you're home, you want to be notified of a water leak, but if you're not at home you want to remain blissfully ignorant until you get home? 😬 Relatively basic when, if, do is pretty comprehensible. It gets a lot weirder if you need to do anything more advanced. I work with computers and HA and automation logic still makes me feel like someone should be paying me to do this work - at home. 😀
I mistakenly read that headline as "Here's a List of Things You Need to Automate in Home Assistant" instead of "Here's How to Automate the Boring Stuff".
"I'll leave a link to those blueprints in the description" (Vidoe time: 03:15). Looking at the description I see Paypal, Cash App, Buy me a coffee, Amazon affiliate link, t-shirt shop, twitter/X, discord and other non video-relevant links, but no link to blueprints. You are not the only one doing this, but it's really annoying having to dig through 20 links that has nothing to do with the video, only to realize there is no link, and even if you add the link, the other links are still annoying.
Here you go: www.google.com/search?q=home+assistant+blueprints&oq=home+assistant+blueprints&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyCQgAEEUYORiABDIHCAEQABiABDIICAIQABgWGB4yCAgDEAAYFhgeMggIBBAAGBYYHjIICAUQABgWGB4yCAgGEAAYFhgeMgYIBxBFGDzSAQgzMTU5ajBqNKgCALACAQ&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
Great tutorial for an old rookie. Seems like a lot of the recent UI changes have made a lot of the videos out there mostly obselete or at least confusing. This video is very helpful. You might want to add a video about labels and categories to help automation organized and multi- use.
The UI automation editor rocks! Automations built with it are typically correct by construction, with very little debug required. I originally used NodeRed for automations, and being a NodeRed newbie, was often frustrated when even simple automations would not work.
I just did something very similar but alarms drive my dogs crazy so I made certain lights turn red to alert us in addition to the phone notification and I also added in turning off the water to the house with a zigbee valve. Thanks for all the great content!
Couldn’t agree more on the forums, I ask a specific question, mention that I have read the pages and just don’t quite understand, and I get snotty responses or a simple link to the same pages I’ve already read 20 times.
Yep. That's what I see. Sad really. Because I feel like a lot of the community does want to be helpful. But that experience really hurts home assistant.
Hi Jeff, thanks for another great video. Have been using home assistant for a good few years but it’s no harm to go back to basics once in a while and see what’s new.
Thank you for your efforts and I was really looking for someone to explain it in details. Please consider similar videos for other kind of triggers and actions
Thanks Jeff. Really helpful. Looking to change my node red automations to HA automations and this video is a great help.
I gave you a big thumbs up even though I didn't learn anything in this video mainly because the content is exactly what I would've liked to know. Although, I put Restart as the mode for all my automations. When turning lights on, it can feel laggy if you wanna turn them off, and they're still in a transition phase. Like if the motion sensor sees you, it waists for that to play out before letting you turn off the lights.
I have motion sensors and button presses in the same automation, but when a button is pressed, it disables the motions sensors though a toggle and then turns the toggle back off when you press "Off" from a button. That way, I can keep the lights on when I'm in the room.
With Restart, it lets some things immediately turn off. I have it set a timer to turn back on the motion sensors as part of a sequence in Actions. This is all super complex though. My latest idea is to have the button's "hold off" or just "hold" turn off motion sensors since the only way I have it setup to do that right now is when turning on the lights, and sometimes, I want them off, so I can make the lights brighter at night if I'm working on something.
This is all stuff I'd love to see in a video because I think I'm doing it wrong.
Lastly, I've been thinking hard about Scenes. I use them a ton with LIFX lights, but I'm buying other brands now and using Home Assistant for those. If a light goes bad, or I change it out, I have to remake the scene. It'd be great if I could create a script for each scene and then when I swap out a light, all I have to do is swap out the colors for that light in the script rather than going in the scene and trying to remember what I had them set to.
Home Assistant has a lot of confusing things like this.
Yeah, I definately need to talk more about automations like this. I currently have a "light over-ride switch" that has to manually be turned on that disables the normal timer/motion based automations. Most of my lights have a timer where when the room is no longer occupied the lights turn off after x minutes. But in some places where I dont have good presence tracking like my wife's pottery studio, she can use a voice command "I am up to no good" and the lights will stay on until she issues the voice command "mischief managed" which just kicks off the timer to turn them off.
Thank you. This is an awesome video. I needed this! New subscriber.
Why this guy only have 24K sub? I'm newbie and I thought this well explain video deserved more so I leave this comment to help with yt algorithm.
The use case for parallel is when you have multiple triggers like timing and and you set that at 7 should turn on the ac for 2 hours but at 8 you want to turn off a light you can put them together in one automation
Another great vid Jeff! I was wondering about what all is involved in setting up a 'guest mode'? Maybe another vid perhaps?
Hi Jeff, thanks this is another great video. wondering if you could explain the notify script you setup for this and how it works ??
You mean I'm not the only one that thinks the forum is terrible? Thank goodness... LOL
I have been fighting with myself for a while about doing a video calling out the stuff I see there. Haha
@@SlackerLabs That makes two of us. A while ago, I even got involved in a social thread where I called out a LOT of the stuff that's holding them back from becoming a mainstream-accepted product. The result of that discussion was a large part of the motivation to start a channel trying to teach people about Home Assistant, since it was at that moment that it became clear to me that people would never be able to actually learn anything from the forums.
We should do a live stream and have a conversation about it. LOL
Thank you for real explaining instead of just showing what to click. Kudo's
Thanks! I noticed as I was editing I left some stuff out, but I need to do a followup to talk about the new labels so I'll try to add to this one with more.
So would I use automations to create an alias for a voice command? For instance, I can currently tell Alexa "turn off the entryway light" or "shut off the entryway light" and it works. I'm moving away from Alexa and using the new Assist, and it only understands "turn off the entryway light", if I tell it "shut off the entryway light" it doesn't understand.
I'm actually working on stuff for a video around that. But yeah. There is a "Sentence" trigger that you can specify your voice commands under. Then have it do something. There may be a way to have it translate that into "turn off the entity", but I have mine just call a script. That way the response can be read back by my current Jarvis voice since I only have one working Wyoming Satellite with open wake word running at the moment.
But getting voice commands setup suing the automation was easier than I expected.
Excellent! Thank you.
Try saying "{device name} off" so in your example "entryway off".
Btw, with assist you might be able to add (multiple) aliases to devices and say that instead.
when your basement floods and no-one is home, wouldn't you want to know right away? by the time you get home the damage could be a lot worse.
Yea. I removed that condition after doing the video. It now just sends it all the time.
My automation turns on the bedroom light and says there is water on the Alexa. My phone is do not disturb at night.
Hi Jeff - There have been so many changes over the last 12 months, it's difficult to get yr head around it and keep up to be honest. Some things are changed- without any pre warning or firm instructions what to do. Honestly they seem at times, beyond mere mortal long standing HA users.. even seasoned programmers! (see below!) So my question is this. Is there anybody offering a paid service to log in (securely of course!) repair, spruik and clean up a HA project? Thanks!
So when you're home, you want to be notified of a water leak, but if you're not at home you want to remain blissfully ignorant until you get home? 😬 Relatively basic when, if, do is pretty comprehensible. It gets a lot weirder if you need to do anything more advanced. I work with computers and HA and automation logic still makes me feel like someone should be paying me to do this work - at home. 😀
Yea. I tend to only want actionable notifications. And when we are not home a leak is not something I can do anything about.
@@SlackerLabs I'd especially want it if not at home, so I can properly panic and hurry home to turn the water off.
The Dungeon is getting... MOIST!
it also broadcasts on all the googles in the house...
I mean...I thought about having it say something about the house's nether regions...
@@SlackerLabs ...and another missed opportunity goes by the wayside.
I mistakenly read that headline as "Here's a List of Things You Need to Automate in Home Assistant" instead of "Here's How to Automate the Boring Stuff".
Oh. Now I read it like that too. Hmmm
"I'll leave a link to those blueprints in the description" (Vidoe time: 03:15). Looking at the description I see Paypal, Cash App, Buy me a coffee, Amazon affiliate link, t-shirt shop, twitter/X, discord and other non video-relevant links, but no link to blueprints. You are not the only one doing this, but it's really annoying having to dig through 20 links that has nothing to do with the video, only to realize there is no link, and even if you add the link, the other links are still annoying.
Thanks for the heads up
Here you go: www.google.com/search?q=home+assistant+blueprints&oq=home+assistant+blueprints&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyCQgAEEUYORiABDIHCAEQABiABDIICAIQABgWGB4yCAgDEAAYFhgeMggIBBAAGBYYHjIICAUQABgWGB4yCAgGEAAYFhgeMgYIBxBFGDzSAQgzMTU5ajBqNKgCALACAQ&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8