Have decent hardware (i5 4core, 8Gb ram, SSD), have automatic backup.... BUT - investigating breaking changes and having too many 3.party integrations - NO comments ;-)
Point 3 & 4 go hand-in-hand so to speak. Always make a (full) backup before your update or change anything in HA. If something stops working and you can't get it to work fast enough, restore the backup and than take your time to research the issue. Sometimes it can be worthwhile to also backup the failing 'instance' before your overwrite it with the last backup cause if you have the answer, first backup your HA instance again (always use a fresh backup!), restore the backup with the failed upgrade, apply the fixes that you've found and test HA properly.. If you're using the file-based (sqlite) configuration system and it took several days or even weeks to find an answer to your issue, you might want to perform a fresh upgrade. Otherwise you can loose changes to automations that you (or someone else) made in the meantime. Another common mistake I want to add is that I see people immediately start adding tons of integrations for stuff they 'might' want to use. This is fine as long as you're in the playground phase, but once you really start controlling parts of your house (or office) you need to carefully choose what integrations you are gonna use and property configure them before you start adding the next integration. Take your time. HA looks very easy, but once you've got an issue, it can sometimes be difficult to debug the root cause.. Also document your automations! Node-red can visualize some automations, but scripts at the HA side can be missed. It when you first move into a new house and document which lights or sockets are connected to a breaker switch. Do the same for your HA environment. Document what a switch or sensor controls, but also which states are required for a light to turn on or a socket to become active.. I know that this takes a lot of time, but in the end it makes things easier when things stop working..
A home automation platform introducing breaking changes frequently is insanity. If a breaking change on such an important core peace of software is introduced at all, there need to be huge warnings popping up before it installs that update, not something mentioned in the release notes. This type of policy will always lead to users not installing updates out of fear, or breaking their installations because they do. Terrible experience either way.
Agree.. historically Home Assistant had quite a few breaking changes and was a pain. Luckily this is not a big case anymore as the whole OS is more “final”.
Good advice overall. One thing one might add is that the Raspberry Pi in its default version on a SD-Card can greatly be improved by using a SSD disk and (well-configured) MariaDB instead of the file-based database. I run a 4GB Ram RaspberryPi 4 with a crucial SSD + Maria DB and really everything is flying. Only exception is CPU heavy stuff so I can't really stream 12 cameras at once. But I have several dozen items running great.
I can echo that, I have a 4G Pi4 running HA booting from a NVMe drive and it flys! .. I have 6 HD camera's streaming and integrations into over 50 devices with no issue.. and it boots in less than 10second.
Ditto, house is fully automated with scripts, node red automatons and several hundred entities on a Pi 4. M.2 SSD adapter made a significant improvement. Also helps to use a LAN cable versus using wireless connection on the Pi. Good home network equipment is helpful for setting up IoT virtual networks and reserving IP addresses.
@@EverythingSmartHome Ironically I used a non-standard integration to link the motion sensors that are part of my security system to several automations.. All work great and though the switches have the popcorn affect all work fast on the Pi4.
Just came here from Paul Hibbert's video on Home Assistant, and I've gotta admit: He's right. The "mistakes" you've named are a mismatch of expectations between normal people and Home Assistant. "Why didn't you read the Release Notes"? Because users shouldn't and don't expect to have to read the release notes. I appreciate the work that goes into Home Assistant, but let's not blame the user and pretend that this is an acceptable user experience design.
I get where you are coming from, but you have to remember who the target audience is, it's not the average person (at least not yet, and I'm not sure it ever will be and that's OK) and I don't think the developers would ever claim it was for the average person. You have to remember that this is a free piece of software put together by volunteers giving up their free time, there is only so much they can do with the time and resources they have. Is it as easy as Alexa to setup and use? No. Is it far more capable than Alexa in every single way? Absolutely. It's a trade off, and one that I am happy they have made. Alexa and Google Home have 1% of the functionality at the trade-off of ease of use, and that's OK too because as above, it's not designed for someone like me. Then you have something like KNX which is also very feature rich and can do a lot, but the price is very high and it's all locked down, again a trade-off and designed for different types of people. You get what I'm saying right? If people find Home Assistant difficult and not worth the hassle, then it could be that you aren't the intended user, and that's absolutely fine, there is room for everyone and there is lots of choices for people who want different options. It's all about managing your expectations.
@@EverythingSmartHome Linux is a far more complicated free piece of open software developed largely from people’s free time. They don’t make excuses for breaking peoples computers every few months and the target audience of the kernel is far more technical than the target audience of HA so if the target audience of HA isn’t defined by technical ability then the target audience must be masochist’s or people who feel a sense of superiority from micromanaging a server in their spare time
0:37 Not sizing your hardware appropriately; 1:50 Not removing old integrations; 3:07 Not backing up regularly; 4:09 Not reading release notes; 5:53 Running custom components (community made vs official).
For what Pi's are going for these days, a refurbished mini pc is not that much more. I found one with a desktop i7 processor, 32GB ram and 1TB ssd on the jungle site for under $300 and there were lots to choose from. They just destroy a Pi performance wise, and you'll practically never outgrow it.
@@schrodingersmechanic7622 That difference is worth half of your computer every year in my electricity bill. I'd rather not have that running 24/7 at home.
@@adespade119 15min huh? I can get my food and be eating in 3min and it's delicious. Much easier and faster then shopping for all the ingredients, cooking it (by your own statement, 15 min) , and don't forget cleaning up....
Hi, I have a few questions. I will be glad if you answer. 1. Is there any method to include WiFi devices in HA? 2. İ have Alexa Echo dot 4 and 3 gen. Is it possible to add these to HA? 3. Is it possible to install Tuya WiFi camera to HA without Tuya app?
Regards of the update issue: can you restore the HA firmware (update) and restore the backups after so it fix the issues that the new firmware may have cause?
I've little bit of problem with older integrations but getting better as I've standardized lot of IoTs around Sonoff/ESPHome. My main problem is with naming convention, at the time of setup names like switch-05 or Light-03 sounds so good but few weeks later I am scratching my head!!!
It’s definitely a useful device. But with all the bells and whistles that you add the cost will be close to a decent pentium system. I use PI where I want to run 24x7, wherever power is required I use tiny system like Lenovo Tiny or Optiplex mini which can be wall mounted and can run under your desk with just power and network cable as headless.
I’m really stuck with my home assistant blue. I set it up at my work place and can’t connect it at home. I don’t know how to reset it to factory so that I can run the installation wizard and seemingly can’t find any article relating to resetting. Can you help?
Probably messed up with the computer sizing since I went with the HA Yellow. Your mistake made me think a bit. I've been porting over from the SmartThings. What I might do instead is leave all the old, low priority stuff on the SmartThings and anything new I get (hope to be moving into another house sometime in the next year) install in the HA Yellow. Most the old Zwave stuff won't connect to the HA Yellow anyway so leave all the water sensing stuff on the ST and old PIR to the lesser used rooms. Not worry about speech to text on the HA Yellow and continue to use Alexa for that. And design to minimize needing Alexa to lesser, random tasks like running scripts to disable or enable sets of automations when company or some other random event happens.
Agreed. But even if all these things are fixed, I don't believe Home Assistant will ever become mainstream, because it requires far too much yaml coding to be appealing to a normal person. I don't ever see Home Assistant becoming 100% UI based, and that's what it would take for mainstream adoption. That being said, I still love it!
my poor Pi4 is doing pretty well at around 60 devices. I'm sick to death of my thermostat having API Rate Limited. I need to find a thermostat that doesn't cost a small fortune and has local API.
I made a backup before messing with the config yaml but it didn't restore it apparently, even though it said full backup. So I just wasted a full day of work because it didn't restore my backup or something. When trying to install from backup on a fresh install, it shits itself and says NetworkError when attempting to fetch resource. Excellent piece of kit this HomeAssistant 👍
In ESPHome add-on Once i click on add button in create configuration it shows this message as "Limited functionality because you're not browsing the dashboard over a secure connection (HTTPS)" how to over come this issue
How limited would my Pi4 8gb with ssd drive be? I can easily move my NODE-Red over to my old Pi3 which runs my pihole but so far with 55 devices I’m not noticing any problems other than the Alexa commands lag, especially when none have been issued lately.
@@BeamDeam first command in the morning is delayed bad, sometimes it fails, sometimes it says it fails but actually works. Thinking it was a DNS issue I tried several, originally was using my own on pihole. Have a fairly powerful Unifi network.
Still running on my Pi3 after 5 years and 100 devices and do not see that as a beginner mistake 👍 wonder when Pi will not be enough for the average user 🤔
Good you're still using it, 100 devices is a fairly small install though and 1 device is not the same as another device, they could be completely different types
@@EverythingSmartHome keep up the good work 👌 although I agree more with your “6 hardware recommendations” video that the pi is the perfect beginner system, and not a beginner mistake 🤪
number1 and 4 are easily solved by keeping everything in proxmox, so the VM's can just be moved between hardware in case you want/need to upsize or downsize.
I’m interested in trying out home assistant and have been thinking about the hardware thingy. Feels like the easiest route would be a raspberry pie, lot’s of tutorials etc. I don’t own any pie though, I do however have an old mac mini that’s soon passing apples 10 year death mark and that I’m assuming would do a great job - Got no idea if that would be a stupid decision though 🤷♂️
I dipped into the pool with a Raspberry Pi. Before I knew it I had Tensorflow, countless python scripts, and 8 cameras streaming in. Eventually it had to go live on my PowerEdge. Well said.
Would you be willing to do a Home Assistant for dummies initial setup... Please? I tried setting up HyperV because i have a Multimedia PC that would be great for a HA server, but i have no idea what I'm doing. There is so much confusing setup instructions on HA's own web site.. I'm just lost. Love your videos!
The biggest difference between a Home Assistant integration and a Custom Integration (from my experience) is that the Home Assistant integration only contains the most basic features that will let them claim "integration" whereas the custom integrations are more full featured, robust and usable!
Actually, that isn't needed anymore. Restarting will check the configuration nowadays before actually restarting. If something did slip up, worst case, you'll end up in safe mode which allows you to correct it :). So, validating config before restarting, is a bit of an old school advise :)
I have an idea for you and not sure where to post: Using Deepstacks as a sensor for door locks. A simple camera looking at your interior door to confirm its locked. I'm hacking a Zigbee reed switch, but I think this could be better.. thoughts?
I agree with most of what you've said but the issue is that updates should be seamless and if they contain breaking changes they should have a transition wizard to help. Imagine taking months to set this up and you just want it to run and then every single time you update you read these stupid logs instead of just updating like a normal human being. A sign of any successful and well maintained software is ease of update, expecting users to fix stuff every time an update happens is bad and no user should be faulted for not reading all of the changelogs. Where do we end to be sure? Should I also read github commits maybe just to avoid potential issues with my devices?
This is not only for beginners ;-) You are so right, this is recurring things to think about over and over again.. AGAIN a Nice video, PLEASE make a follow-up, Thanks
Smart home stuff is made to make life easier, using things like home assistant, home controller, Home pass, home seer, or hoobs and constantly dealing with issues because it’s a patchwork of chaos and code does not make anything easier. Just got with apple home kit. Everything just works and it’s all in one app.
Smart home stuff is meant to make things easier sure, but for a lot of people it's also a passion and a hobby. Some also want the ability to be able to create insanely complicated automations - homekit doesn't give you that, it's incredibly limited and inferior in that regard. It's a trade off :)
I dared to set a static IP address following a RUclips tutorial. I followed the exact instructions for changing the IP to static on my home assistant green and bricked it. It's completely inaccessible now, can't access it through the homeassistant:local:8123 option, nor through the IP address showing in my router settings for the Home Assistant. Word to the wise, never change the IP to static, because I can't find any way on the internet to actually fix it.
Ha. I'm not guilty of removing old/unused integrations....but I am really bad about cleaning up my old entities, automation, and scripts. Not what you mentioned exactly...but this video reminded me that I need to get back to cleaning up my config. And I am trying to prune any custom integration that doesn't rely on an official API for integration.
Hi mate... love the vids as always.. One issue I see a lot is people not understanding Core vs Supervised. I still struggle to follow your videos as you use Supervised and I use Core. Biggest pain for me is an automated backup and export which isn't so easy on Core.
Thanks man! I agree that is a common mistake, have done an entire video explaining the difference so hopefully that helps some people. I hear ya, problem is the vast majority are using OS or Supervised at least according to the stats, so unfortunately means I tend to cater towards that at the moment.
I don’t get the first point already. Noticing that your hardware is not sufficient anymore further down the road is not a beginner mistake, I would even say it’s not a mistake at all. When you’re starting out, you don’t know yet how it will evolve. Let’s don’t do premature optimization 😅👍🏼
Stop. My job is a water meter gives an impulse for every liter. These should be counted and written into a table over the year. So should I now install Home Assistant on a Pentium I7 with 1GHz? And more importantly: how should I do that?
Thank you for taking the time to make this video. Over the last several year I'm guilty of making everyone of the those mistakes you shared. I would be in favor of you making a part 2 of mistakes to avoid. I don't know if this would classifies as a mistake or not? I've have migrated my Home Assistant from a raspberrypi 3 to a Windows10 PC running a VM to, where I"m at now, a server running Unraid with Home Assistant running on a VM. What I keep running into is not enough storage space. Each time I setup a New Home Assistant it will only let me set it up with 32gb of space and I keep running out of usable disk space. I'm I doing something wrong on the entail setup?? I don't see anywhere to increase the memory size. Thanks!
Catch like No 171. Sorry for so late response - I was fighting with stop working of MariaDB until I read breaking changes of latest release, as recommended in this video.
After struggling to have HA running stable on RPi4, I've looked into properly configuring the recorder: - exluded a lot of devices/domains for which I didn't care keeping history! - reduced auto purge to 1 week. - increased commit interval to 20sec. The result: the database went from 1GB with 1.1million total records to 70MB with 100.000 records! This dramatically improved the system speed and removed the stability issues. I can run withotu any crash for months.
99% people are converting their homes into "smart homes" by implementing "after market" solutions. At the end they have a zoo of various "smart devices" that are kept under one roof called Home Assistant. And HA should keep track and communicate to all of them, and that of course takes time. I built my house electrical wiring around Siemens LOGO 240RCE (4 main modules + 8 extension). I have 96 physical inputs (78 used) and 80 physical outputs (75 used at the moment). And Home Assistant is communicating to those 4 Siemens LOGO modules (via 4 local IP's) and further via Siemens scheme software network inputs/outputs (coils) and can control in parallel all the consumer groups that LOGO's can control. I have also 5 Shelly1 and 4 Shelly1PM that are controlled primary by HA (only devices that HA communicates via Wi-Fi), but can be controlled also by LOGO via HA. HA is installed on RPi4 8Gb, and HA start-up time is like 30 seconds. So HA on RPi4 LOGO controls total of 84 devices (75 via LOGO and 9 directly) with start-up time less than 30 secs. All that matters is appropriate physical infrastructure (wiring).
@@EverythingSmartHome A pi running on an SD card is road to failure and relatively quick failure too. a home control system should never be ran from an SD card, its max reads and writes are soon consumed with all the data that home assistant records and manages
When you mention/ link other videos within your video can you also provide a link in the description.. it’s painful to try to hunt for links in videos especially on mobile. Example; I want to watch this video, that’s why I clicked it, but you mention other things within video.. link comes and goes. If I were to click it while watching you get taken away from the video you were trying to watch in the first place.. I’m sure a lot of people know this and just suck it up but I feel like it should be a basic thing for any RUclips video because by far, not everyone is on a desktop. (You’re not the only person, just mentioning it)
Honestly there is no reason there should be breaking changes. Imagine installing updates bricked your phone and Apple said “why didn’t you ssh into the phone and update a config file first?” Don’t make excuses for bad developers
Nah this is pretty common. If you are willing to pay for HA as much as for an iPhone then the team will have the time to develop a migration script with each major release.
Has nothing to do with bad developers and it's just purely economics. Pretty much all FREE software comes with breaking changes at some point in its lifecycle. people are contributing thousands of hours to develop something you don't pay them a dime for, you can do a little on your end so they don't have to spend another thousand hours making sure it works with every past configuration. Don't like it, then pay for commerical software and it *might* be better, but honestly most commerical software has similar issues they just force people to update automatically or end of life versions and don't even let you upgrade at some point.
Please help your viewers by adding a TOC (table of contents) in your videos so we can jump to the subject we are interested in. Some of us are not totally new but might want to review a specific subject to see if we learn anything. If we are new we might want to go back and review a specific subject in order to ensure we understood all of the points of the subject.
So far what I've learned is if you're new to HA you get about a 2 question allowance before people start treating you like dog s$#@. Documentation is horrible at best.... if you can't find the answer you're looking for after searching in the forum then just give up.....that's pretty much what I've been taught so far.
I think you've been unlucky if that's the experience you've had with the community, generally the community is excellent! If your stuck then join the ESH discord, we run a very friendly community there
I'll be brutally truthful here. As a beginner with HA, I have no idea what you are on about. You are talking expert speak to people like me who don't yet know what the phrases that you are using mean,
I'm starting to think that HA is garbage. Used it for a year, many issues, till one day dead. Reinstalled, used back up. Many things not working anymore. Moved from one PC VM to a whole new machine and crashed, won't load. Try, and try again. Same. Almost not worth it.
Be truthful...which ones are you guilty of? 😂
I run on RPi 3 and my ha start to feel slow when and I try running frigate
That would do it!
Not ironing my T-Shirt... Just kidding, nice merch ;) Seriously though, not reading release notes and not knowing how to properly troubleshoot...
Have decent hardware (i5 4core, 8Gb ram, SSD), have automatic backup.... BUT - investigating breaking changes and having too many 3.party integrations - NO comments ;-)
Backups
Thank you so much for not doing annoying injections of humor and non-revelant content like many of the other youtubers. Your channel is great!
Point 3 & 4 go hand-in-hand so to speak. Always make a (full) backup before your update or change anything in HA. If something stops working and you can't get it to work fast enough, restore the backup and than take your time to research the issue. Sometimes it can be worthwhile to also backup the failing 'instance' before your overwrite it with the last backup cause if you have the answer, first backup your HA instance again (always use a fresh backup!), restore the backup with the failed upgrade, apply the fixes that you've found and test HA properly..
If you're using the file-based (sqlite) configuration system and it took several days or even weeks to find an answer to your issue, you might want to perform a fresh upgrade. Otherwise you can loose changes to automations that you (or someone else) made in the meantime.
Another common mistake I want to add is that I see people immediately start adding tons of integrations for stuff they 'might' want to use. This is fine as long as you're in the playground phase, but once you really start controlling parts of your house (or office) you need to carefully choose what integrations you are gonna use and property configure them before you start adding the next integration. Take your time. HA looks very easy, but once you've got an issue, it can sometimes be difficult to debug the root cause..
Also document your automations! Node-red can visualize some automations, but scripts at the HA side can be missed. It when you first move into a new house and document which lights or sockets are connected to a breaker switch. Do the same for your HA environment. Document what a switch or sensor controls, but also which states are required for a light to turn on or a socket to become active.. I know that this takes a lot of time, but in the end it makes things easier when things stop working..
A home automation platform introducing breaking changes frequently is insanity. If a breaking change on such an important core peace of software is introduced at all, there need to be huge warnings popping up before it installs that update, not something mentioned in the release notes. This type of policy will always lead to users not installing updates out of fear, or breaking their installations because they do. Terrible experience either way.
Agree.. historically Home Assistant had quite a few breaking changes and was a pain. Luckily this is not a big case anymore as the whole OS is more “final”.
Agreed
@@ChickenTenderX historically? It happened less than a year ago
@@hackberry4009 what was the recent breaking change? I almost never update mine so I don't think I even noticed
i'm really glad i followed your backup video, it works great and gives some peace of mind
My man 🙌 backups are so essential!
Yeah, make part two!
Good advice overall. One thing one might add is that the Raspberry Pi in its default version on a SD-Card can greatly be improved by using a SSD disk and (well-configured) MariaDB instead of the file-based database. I run a 4GB Ram RaspberryPi 4 with a crucial SSD + Maria DB and really everything is flying. Only exception is CPU heavy stuff so I can't really stream 12 cameras at once. But I have several dozen items running great.
I can echo that, I have a 4G Pi4 running HA booting from a NVMe drive and it flys! .. I have 6 HD camera's streaming and integrations into over 50 devices with no issue.. and it boots in less than 10second.
Indeed, there are videos for both of those!
It's not so much the streaming that's intensive, but more motion/object detection etc.
Ditto, house is fully automated with scripts, node red automatons and several hundred entities on a Pi 4. M.2 SSD adapter made a significant improvement. Also helps to use a LAN cable versus using wireless connection on the Pi. Good home network equipment is helpful for setting up IoT virtual networks and reserving IP addresses.
@@EverythingSmartHome Ironically I used a non-standard integration to link the motion sensors that are part of my security system to several automations.. All work great and though the switches have the popcorn affect all work fast on the Pi4.
@@EverythingSmartHome Yup motioneye got me with my PI, heated it up to no end. Ended up just ditching that integration.
Just came here from Paul Hibbert's video on Home Assistant, and I've gotta admit: He's right. The "mistakes" you've named are a mismatch of expectations between normal people and Home Assistant. "Why didn't you read the Release Notes"? Because users shouldn't and don't expect to have to read the release notes. I appreciate the work that goes into Home Assistant, but let's not blame the user and pretend that this is an acceptable user experience design.
I get where you are coming from, but you have to remember who the target audience is, it's not the average person (at least not yet, and I'm not sure it ever will be and that's OK) and I don't think the developers would ever claim it was for the average person.
You have to remember that this is a free piece of software put together by volunteers giving up their free time, there is only so much they can do with the time and resources they have. Is it as easy as Alexa to setup and use? No. Is it far more capable than Alexa in every single way? Absolutely. It's a trade off, and one that I am happy they have made. Alexa and Google Home have 1% of the functionality at the trade-off of ease of use, and that's OK too because as above, it's not designed for someone like me. Then you have something like KNX which is also very feature rich and can do a lot, but the price is very high and it's all locked down, again a trade-off and designed for different types of people. You get what I'm saying right?
If people find Home Assistant difficult and not worth the hassle, then it could be that you aren't the intended user, and that's absolutely fine, there is room for everyone and there is lots of choices for people who want different options. It's all about managing your expectations.
@@EverythingSmartHome Linux is a far more complicated free piece of open software developed largely from people’s free time. They don’t make excuses for breaking peoples computers every few months and the target audience of the kernel is far more technical than the target audience of HA so if the target audience of HA isn’t defined by technical ability then the target audience must be masochist’s or people who feel a sense of superiority from micromanaging a server in their spare time
Making backups alone won't help you if you don't know how to restore from them
0:37 Not sizing your hardware appropriately; 1:50 Not removing old integrations; 3:07 Not backing up regularly; 4:09 Not reading release notes; 5:53 Running custom components (community made vs official).
1:28 Can't you just backup your HA system and restore it on new hardware?
For what Pi's are going for these days, a refurbished mini pc is not that much more. I found one with a desktop i7 processor, 32GB ram and 1TB ssd on the jungle site for under $300 and there were lots to choose from. They just destroy a Pi performance wise, and you'll practically never outgrow it.
And cost 1000 times as much in electricity.
And tbh outgrowing a raspberry pi 4 or 5 for home automation would be a stretch or mean the software has huge performance issues.
@xt5181 40 watts vs 5 watts, for 50 times the computer.
@@schrodingersmechanic7622 That difference is worth half of your computer every year in my electricity bill. I'd rather not have that running 24/7 at home.
Those aren't unused add ons.. those are ones I plan to get at eventurally!
Not guilty? Okay.. guilty...
Guilty!!! 🔨
all this work setting up and maintaining updates and configurations, wouldn't it be easier just to switch the light on manually.
Why ever cook a home-cooked meal when it's much easier to hit up the McDonald's drive-thru.
@@nappyjim it's not easier, I can cook better than 95% of the restaurants/cafes on the planet and have a meal in 15 mins.
@@adespade119 15min huh? I can get my food and be eating in 3min and it's delicious. Much easier and faster then shopping for all the ingredients, cooking it (by your own statement, 15 min) , and don't forget cleaning up....
I would be very interested in part 2 of this video. Just getting started with home assistant so the timing would be perfect 😊
Cheers Mark and good luck!
Hi, I have a few questions. I will be glad if you answer.
1. Is there any method to include WiFi devices in HA?
2. İ have Alexa Echo dot 4 and 3 gen. Is it possible to add these to HA?
3. Is it possible to install Tuya WiFi camera to HA without Tuya app?
Regards of the update issue: can you restore the HA firmware (update) and restore the backups after so it fix the issues that the new firmware may have cause?
I am not able to replicate the screen that showed up start up time (@ 2:26) in my HA instance.
It's under the info page in configuration! Make sure you are on the 2021.5 release
I've little bit of problem with older integrations but getting better as I've standardized lot of IoTs around Sonoff/ESPHome. My main problem is with naming convention, at the time of setup names like switch-05 or Light-03 sounds so good but few weeks later I am scratching my head!!!
That's a good one!
Hello brother . I am stuck at preparing home assistant. Installed it in qnap nas VM
Cool video, I can install on the same Raspberry Pi both NAS and Home Assistant ?
Question: Is a Pi5 sufficiently powerful for a large deployment?
It’s definitely a useful device. But with all the bells and whistles that you add the cost will be close to a decent pentium system. I use PI where I want to run 24x7, wherever power is required I use tiny system like Lenovo Tiny or Optiplex mini which can be wall mounted and can run under your desk with just power and network cable as headless.
I didn’t take any backups and the SD card corrupted on the Raspberry Pi. Now currently rebuilding 🤦♀️ in a VM on my Dell r210.
im runng HA(CS) on qnap docker. if i need more power. ill switch to rp4
Perfect video. Great information and advice.
Appreciate you! 🙏
Sorry i have one questin ! All devices in my network are finding my PLEX DLNA media but only home assistant cant... :( why ?
And how do I tell if an Integration is official or Custom??
I'm new to Home Assistant, a couple of weeks. It is hard to read the release notes when none of it makes any sense to me.
I’m really stuck with my home assistant blue. I set it up at my work place and can’t connect it at home. I don’t know how to reset it to factory so that I can run the installation wizard and seemingly can’t find any article relating to resetting. Can you help?
Probably messed up with the computer sizing since I went with the HA Yellow. Your mistake made me think a bit. I've been porting over from the SmartThings. What I might do instead is leave all the old, low priority stuff on the SmartThings and anything new I get (hope to be moving into another house sometime in the next year) install in the HA Yellow. Most the old Zwave stuff won't connect to the HA Yellow anyway so leave all the water sensing stuff on the ST and old PIR to the lesser used rooms. Not worry about speech to text on the HA Yellow and continue to use Alexa for that. And design to minimize needing Alexa to lesser, random tasks like running scripts to disable or enable sets of automations when company or some other random event happens.
Where can I find the "startup times" list (2:25) ? I'm running a supervised HA
Configuration -> Info -> Scroll Down
@@rslbrg Thanks pal
@@rslbrg mine doesn't have start times? what am I missing?
@@mikew8346 It was new in 2021.5. Check the release notes under "Startup visibility - What is taking so long?"
A lot of these reasons are the exact reasons home assistant will never become mainstream unless there’re changed
Agreed. But even if all these things are fixed, I don't believe Home Assistant will ever become mainstream, because it requires far too much yaml coding to be appealing to a normal person. I don't ever see Home Assistant becoming 100% UI based, and that's what it would take for mainstream adoption. That being said, I still love it!
my poor Pi4 is doing pretty well at around 60 devices. I'm sick to death of my thermostat having API Rate Limited. I need to find a thermostat that doesn't cost a small fortune and has local API.
I made a backup before messing with the config yaml but it didn't restore it apparently, even though it said full backup. So I just wasted a full day of work because it didn't restore my backup or something. When trying to install from backup on a fresh install, it shits itself and says NetworkError when attempting to fetch resource. Excellent piece of kit this HomeAssistant 👍
How did you get the start times to show ion that list? I'm assuming that is the info list under the server controls menu?
Yep that's right! Make sure you are on at least the may release I think it was
In ESPHome add-on Once i click on add button in create configuration it shows this message as "Limited functionality because you're not browsing the dashboard over a secure connection (HTTPS)" how to over come this issue
How limited would my Pi4 8gb with ssd drive be? I can easily move my NODE-Red over to my old Pi3 which runs my pihole but so far with 55 devices I’m not noticing any problems other than the Alexa commands lag, especially when none have been issued lately.
Pi4 is really powerful.
Alexa commands are delayed in general.
Did you integrate Alexa over the nabu casa subscription or with AWS?
Just get an ASIC-Rig, Sagitta Brutalis or BOXX RenderBoxx. All those systems are powerful enough to run HomeAssistant as wel as many more other tasks
If you are not having any issues, then no need to change ☺️
@@BeamDeam the AWS was over my head, tried and failed. Nabu Casa, happily give them their $5/month.
@@BeamDeam first command in the morning is delayed bad, sometimes it fails, sometimes it says it fails but actually works. Thinking it was a DNS issue I tried several, originally was using my own on pihole. Have a fairly powerful Unifi network.
Still running on my Pi3 after 5 years and 100 devices and do not see that as a beginner mistake 👍 wonder when Pi will not be enough for the average user 🤔
Good you're still using it, 100 devices is a fairly small install though and 1 device is not the same as another device, they could be completely different types
@@EverythingSmartHome keep up the good work 👌 although I agree more with your “6 hardware recommendations” video that the pi is the perfect beginner system, and not a beginner mistake 🤪
number1 and 4 are easily solved by keeping everything in proxmox, so the VM's can just be moved between hardware in case you want/need to upsize or downsize.
Is there Homeasistant written in something different than Python?
LOL, I was just about to update my HA when I stopped and read thru the release notes before continuing😁😁
Haha well done 😂
I’m interested in trying out home assistant and have been thinking about the hardware thingy. Feels like the easiest route would be a raspberry pie, lot’s of tutorials etc. I don’t own any pie though, I do however have an old mac mini that’s soon passing apples 10 year death mark and that I’m assuming would do a great job - Got no idea if that would be a stupid decision though 🤷♂️
It's certainly not the worst idea, you could run it on a VM
@@EverythingSmartHome Would you recommend swapping out Mac OS for some Linux dist?
I dipped into the pool with a Raspberry Pi. Before I knew it I had Tensorflow, countless python scripts, and 8 cameras streaming in. Eventually it had to go live on my PowerEdge. Well said.
PowerEdge all day long! 🙌
What is the tensorflow usage for if you don't mind?
Helpful - thanks.
Good stuff, cheers!
Would you be willing to do a Home Assistant for dummies initial setup... Please? I tried setting up HyperV because i have a Multimedia PC that would be great for a HA server, but i have no idea what I'm doing. There is so much confusing setup instructions on HA's own web site.. I'm just lost. Love your videos!
I would advise not using hyper-v if possible - using virtual box if you want to use Windows!
The biggest difference between a Home Assistant integration and a Custom Integration (from my experience) is that the Home Assistant integration only contains the most basic features that will let them claim "integration" whereas the custom integrations are more full featured, robust and usable!
Great video. You may add: restart without validating the yaml files BEFORE
Yes!! I'm in the habit now, after screwing it up majorly before.
Home Assistant won't let you restart without a valid configuration since a few releases back. Not sure how this is still happening to some people.
Home assistant won't even let me restart if the yaml isn't valid
Classic!
Actually, that isn't needed anymore. Restarting will check the configuration nowadays before actually restarting. If something did slip up, worst case, you'll end up in safe mode which allows you to correct it :). So, validating config before restarting, is a bit of an old school advise :)
Off course, up for the second part
I have an idea for you and not sure where to post: Using Deepstacks as a sensor for door locks. A simple camera looking at your interior door to confirm its locked. I'm hacking a Zigbee reed switch, but I think this could be better.. thoughts?
It's a fun idea for sure but could be very impractical for most people I would guess! Hope you get it though!
I am excited for a Part 2
May I get your wallpaper on your pc ?
A part 2 would be fantastic!
Keep your eyes peeled 👀
hi,
i have a doubt .
can i get the output display by hdmi port in rasberry pi where i installed home assistant??
Shouldn't be an issue even though this is quite an old comment xD
I agree with most of what you've said but the issue is that updates should be seamless and if they contain breaking changes they should have a transition wizard to help. Imagine taking months to set this up and you just want it to run and then every single time you update you read these stupid logs instead of just updating like a normal human being. A sign of any successful and well maintained software is ease of update, expecting users to fix stuff every time an update happens is bad and no user should be faulted for not reading all of the changelogs. Where do we end to be sure? Should I also read github commits maybe just to avoid potential issues with my devices?
This is not only for beginners ;-) You are so right, this is recurring things to think about over and over again.. AGAIN a Nice video, PLEASE make a follow-up, Thanks
Thanks Niels! Appreciate it!
Smart home stuff is made to make life easier, using things like home assistant, home controller, Home pass, home seer, or hoobs and constantly dealing with issues because it’s a patchwork of chaos and code does not make anything easier. Just got with apple home kit. Everything just works and it’s all in one app.
Smart home stuff is meant to make things easier sure, but for a lot of people it's also a passion and a hobby. Some also want the ability to be able to create insanely complicated automations - homekit doesn't give you that, it's incredibly limited and inferior in that regard. It's a trade off :)
stuck on select home asst server. App wont open so access to settings is not possible.
I dared to set a static IP address following a RUclips tutorial. I followed the exact instructions for changing the IP to static on my home assistant green and bricked it. It's completely inaccessible now, can't access it through the homeassistant:local:8123 option, nor through the IP address showing in my router settings for the Home Assistant. Word to the wise, never change the IP to static, because I can't find any way on the internet to actually fix it.
Ha. I'm not guilty of removing old/unused integrations....but I am really bad about cleaning up my old entities, automation, and scripts. Not what you mentioned exactly...but this video reminded me that I need to get back to cleaning up my config. And I am trying to prune any custom integration that doesn't rely on an official API for integration.
Hi mate... love the vids as always..
One issue I see a lot is people not understanding Core vs Supervised.
I still struggle to follow your videos as you use Supervised and I use Core.
Biggest pain for me is an automated backup and export which isn't so easy on Core.
Thanks man! I agree that is a common mistake, have done an entire video explaining the difference so hopefully that helps some people.
I hear ya, problem is the vast majority are using OS or Supervised at least according to the stats, so unfortunately means I tend to cater towards that at the moment.
I don’t get the first point already.
Noticing that your hardware is not sufficient anymore further down the road is not a beginner mistake, I would even say it’s not a mistake at all.
When you’re starting out, you don’t know yet how it will evolve. Let’s don’t do premature optimization 😅👍🏼
BOXX RenderBoxx and Sagitta Brutalis can both run HomeAssistant flawlessly even if you have more the 400 devices.
Yeah, so not sizing your hardware is NOT a problem for beginners, it (may) becomes a problem a few years down the road.
Stop. My job is a water meter gives an impulse for every liter. These should be counted and written into a table over the year.
So should I now install Home Assistant on a Pentium I7 with 1GHz?
And more importantly: how should I do that?
Thank you for taking the time to make this video. Over the last several year I'm guilty of making everyone of the those mistakes you shared. I would be in favor of you making a part 2 of mistakes to avoid. I don't know if this would classifies as a mistake or not? I've have migrated my Home Assistant from a raspberrypi 3 to a Windows10 PC running a VM to, where I"m at now, a server running Unraid with Home Assistant running on a VM. What I keep running into is not enough storage space. Each time I setup a New Home Assistant it will only let me set it up with 32gb of space and I keep running out of usable disk space. I'm I doing something wrong on the entail setup?? I don't see anywhere to increase the memory size. Thanks!
Thanks! You can expand the disk space on the drive, there may be a guide online somewhere for that
A second part would be great! Thanks for the vids!
Thanks Chris!
Catch like No 171. Sorry for so late response - I was fighting with stop working of MariaDB until I read breaking changes of latest release, as recommended in this video.
Haha glad you figured it out!
Pi 4 8GB and fast SD card no issues.
After struggling to have HA running stable on RPi4, I've looked into properly configuring the recorder:
- exluded a lot of devices/domains for which I didn't care keeping history!
- reduced auto purge to 1 week.
- increased commit interval to 20sec.
The result: the database went from 1GB with 1.1million total records to 70MB with 100.000 records!
This dramatically improved the system speed and removed the stability issues. I can run withotu any crash for months.
That's a good one! Big difference!
99% people are converting their homes into "smart homes" by implementing "after market" solutions. At the end they have a zoo of various "smart devices" that are kept under one roof called Home Assistant. And HA should keep track and communicate to all of them, and that of course takes time. I built my house electrical wiring around Siemens LOGO 240RCE (4 main modules + 8 extension). I have 96 physical inputs (78 used) and 80 physical outputs (75 used at the moment). And Home Assistant is communicating to those 4 Siemens LOGO modules (via 4 local IP's) and further via Siemens scheme software network inputs/outputs (coils) and can control in parallel all the consumer groups that LOGO's can control. I have also 5 Shelly1 and 4 Shelly1PM that are controlled primary by HA (only devices that HA communicates via Wi-Fi), but can be controlled also by LOGO via HA. HA is installed on RPi4 8Gb, and HA start-up time is like 30 seconds. So HA on RPi4 LOGO controls total of 84 devices (75 via LOGO and 9 directly) with start-up time less than 30 secs. All that matters is appropriate physical infrastructure (wiring).
Going from deconz to Zha was a mistake.. not a single lamp was reset..
Hi, you should add chapters to the description/video timeline.
Yes to part2 thanks
Thanks Martin!
did you completely miss that people use an SD card instead of an ssd or hd
No. What are you referring to?
@@EverythingSmartHome A pi running on an SD card is road to failure and relatively quick failure too. a home control system should never be ran from an SD card, its max reads and writes are soon consumed with all the data that home assistant records and manages
Try to run doods with 3 camera with 5s scan intervals
Buy a RenderBoxx for doods you can even set it as low as 1 or 2 seconds without a major processor or memory burden.
Haha that's a good one!
Great video! Also, cool shirt. Where'd you get it? I need to get one.
Thanks! If you go on my twitter I posted a link to it yesterday! Hope that helps
Top vídeo! second part please 😉
Thanks my friend!
When you mention/ link other videos within your video can you also provide a link in the description.. it’s painful to try to hunt for links in videos especially on mobile. Example; I want to watch this video, that’s why I clicked it, but you mention other things within video.. link comes and goes. If I were to click it while watching you get taken away from the video you were trying to watch in the first place.. I’m sure a lot of people know this and just suck it up but I feel like it should be a basic thing for any RUclips video because by far, not everyone is on a desktop. (You’re not the only person, just mentioning it)
Honestly there is no reason there should be breaking changes. Imagine installing updates bricked your phone and Apple said “why didn’t you ssh into the phone and update a config file first?” Don’t make excuses for bad developers
Nah this is pretty common. If you are willing to pay for HA as much as for an iPhone then the team will have the time to develop a migration script with each major release.
Big sense of entitlement here.
Has nothing to do with bad developers and it's just purely economics. Pretty much all FREE software comes with breaking changes at some point in its lifecycle. people are contributing thousands of hours to develop something you don't pay them a dime for, you can do a little on your end so they don't have to spend another thousand hours making sure it works with every past configuration. Don't like it, then pay for commerical software and it *might* be better, but honestly most commerical software has similar issues they just force people to update automatically or end of life versions and don't even let you upgrade at some point.
Nice shirt!
Cheers Jim!
Please help your viewers by adding a TOC (table of contents) in your videos so we can jump to the subject we are interested in. Some of us are not totally new but might want to review a specific subject to see if we learn anything. If we are new we might want to go back and review a specific subject in order to ensure we understood all of the points of the subject.
Longer videos have timestamps but it's only an 8 minute video :)
Nice video but would really appreciate if you would use time stamps.
Thanks! It's only 8 minutes :)
@@EverythingSmartHome I would know where to skip if I already know the current point your talking about 😇
I'm building my home as a smart home so I do not yet have Home Assistant. So, technically, I'm guilty of none of these mistakes..... 🙂
So far what I've learned is if you're new to HA you get about a 2 question allowance before people start treating you like dog s$#@. Documentation is horrible at best.... if you can't find the answer you're looking for after searching in the forum then just give up.....that's pretty much what I've been taught so far.
I think you've been unlucky if that's the experience you've had with the community, generally the community is excellent! If your stuck then join the ESH discord, we run a very friendly community there
Time stamps pls 🥺
It's only 8 minutes...you can manage 😅
Did Paul Hibbert watched this video ? 😂😂😂
Part 2 would be good :¬}
I'll be brutally truthful here. As a beginner with HA, I have no idea what you are on about. You are talking expert speak to people like me who don't yet know what the phrases that you are using mean,
#1 biggest mistake is probably using a raspberry pi. Especially in 2022 when they cost silly money. 😂
Number 6: not drinking enough water each day
Number 7: forget to breathe
really, this was the most useless "tips" video i have seen in a long while
ParTwo! ParTwo! ParTwo!
I like it
Thanks Miguel!!
WHAAAAAAT!? You want me to read? 🤣😂
what accent is that?
Scottish!
I have tip for you - take a deep breath and let it all out before starting to record, you sound like you've just ran 5k
Man, you should iron your t shirt :)
Was too excited too wear it after getting it! :)
I'm starting to think that HA is garbage. Used it for a year, many issues, till one day dead. Reinstalled, used back up. Many things not working anymore. Moved from one PC VM to a whole new machine and crashed, won't load. Try, and try again. Same. Almost not worth it.
Most of these don't sound like something that should be issues. I can't see home assistant growing to the masses.
Needs ironing!!!!😀😀😀 Just joking!
First mistake is to waste hours getting it to work.