Home Assistant COMPLETE Beginners Guide

***GET MY HOME ASSISTANT SETUP BELOW***
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. By buying through any of the links below I will earn commission at no extra cost to you :)

BUY THE CONBEE STICK:

BUY A RASPBERRY PI (Power supply case and SD card not included so make sure you order them too!):

BUY THE KINGSTON SSD DRIVE

BUY THE SSD ADAPTER

=============================
BUY ME A BEER
==============================

OTHER SMART HOME DEVICES I RECOMMEND
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. By buying through any of the links below I will earn commission at no extra cost to you :)

CONBEE STICK (ENABLES ZIGBEE DEVICES TO CONNECT TO HOME ASSISTANT):

OUTDOORLED STRIP (REQUIRES TUYA ZIGBEE HUB OR CONBEE STICK AND PI)

AQARA ZIGBEE MOTION SENSORS AND DOOR SENSORS (REQUIRES AQARA HUB OR CONBEE STICK & PI):

AQARA LIGHT BULB E27 (REQUIRES AQARA HUB OR CONBEE STICK & PI):

AQARA LIGHT SWITCH (REQUIRES AQARA HUB OR CONBEE STICK & PI):

AQARA BATTERY REMOTE LIGHT SWITCH (REQUIRES AQARA HUB OR CONBEE STICK & PI):

TUYA ZIGBEE MOTION SENSORS AND DOOR SENSORS:

TUYA ZIGBEE CURTAIN TRACK MOTOR:

TUYA BLIND MOTORS

FLIC BUTTONS (SMART BLUETOOTH BUTTONS):

BUY A RASPBERRY PI HERE (TO HOST HOME ASSISTANT):

BROADLINK RM4 PRO (TO CONTROL INFRARED DEVICES SUCH AS TV & RF DEVICES SUCH AS PROJECTOR SCREENS)

ZIGBEE PLUG SOCKET (REQUIRES ZIGBEE HUB SUCH AS HUBITAT OR SMARTTHINGS):

REMOTE CONTROL CANDLES

DECORATIVE BULBS FROM SHELLY

ZIGBEE SPOTLIGHTS & RGB REMOTE

ROBOROCAK ROBOVAC

MOON LAMP (TUYA SMART LIFE WIFI - NO HUB REQUIRED)
US: Unavailable :(

LIFX BEAM

SOMA SMART BLIND MOTOR:

LIFX BULBS AND STRIPS IN THE GYM & DOOR FRAME LIGHT IN THE STUDIO

4K HORIZON PRO PROJECTOR IN THE BEDROOM

AMAZON ECHO 4TH GENERATION:

ECHO SHOW 10

0:00 - Intro
0:30 - Home Assistant Hardware
1:07 - You Will Need
1:45 - Home Assistant Raspberry Pi 4 Construction
3:11 - Installing Home Assistant on Raspberry Pi 4
5:24 - Raspberry Pi Boot from USB
6:13 - Home Assistant First Time Actions
7:50 - Home Assistant Zigbee setup
8:14 - Home Assistant Mobile App
9:15 - Home Assistant Dashboard Tutorial
13:01 - Nabu Casa Setup : Home Assistant Cloud
14:19 - Home Assistant Alexa Support
15:42 - Home Assistant Scenes
16:59 - Home Assistant Automation
18:59 - Home Assistant Backups

[ReevansElectro]

At which point in the setup did your wife file for divorce?

[CMDR_EliziumRA]

Great timing, I set up HA about 6 months ago, got what I needed working and then felt a bit lost and left it at that. Last week, a couple things stopped working. I'll follow this and get a better start this time. Thank you sir! HOME ASSISTANT!! HOME ASSISTANT!!!

[dancoon]

Great little video for anyone starting out. It's amazing how much easier it's gotten since I started using it about 4 years ago when everything was in YAML

[GregiiFlieger]

Home Assistant for normal people. Brilliant Paul. You have given me hope! Thanks 😊

[SmartLifeEnthusiast]

Note on using the Conbee (or any USB-based Zigbee controllers) in combination with the RPi, although your case may have actually solved it:
The WiFi antenna signal may interfere with the Zigbee antenna signal, so you need to distance them apart using a USB extension cable (or use a case that includes it).

[neilgreenaway]

Yes!!! back to your best with step by step tutorials. Loads of info to get started. Just need to dig out my Pi4 that buried in a draw somewhere a couple of months back coz I was too scared to try it. More of this please Paul. Your tutorials are great!

[mkjustuk]

Great video, nice and straightforward but covers all the basics in 20 mins 👍

[TheGheddon]

Oh my goodness, I am so reluctant to click the play icon, I have a feeling that I am about to jump into a very nerdy rabbit hole. I hope I don’t end up hip thrusting everyone.

[theamzngq]

You got me pointed in the right direction, thanks! Seeing as how this video was posted 11 months ago, it's amazing how much the web and app interfaces have changed in so short a time...but, your info (and my past experience) allowed me to find what I was looking for to move forward. Thanks!

[MichaelSmith-fgxh]

Just got inspired by this and installed home assistant and commissioned 5 lights with scenes. I deployed on proxmox and it had none of the non-responsive delay periods after the install wizard. A few suggestions on Pauls approach (1) I'd put a redirect on your router so the external server gets redirected to your internal server when you're connected at home (2) A virtualisation server with NVME is available for ~200-250 USD and sips tens of watts... then you can run pihole etc isolated but on the same box

[netsplit]

Actually running Home Assistant right now because your earlier video on the Tuya local integration gave me the push to do it. Works pretty good so far. Main issue the rube goldberg collection of sensors, IR blasters, and scripts needed to make it work with the minisplit, is just one of the many rabbit holes you can find in Home Assistant. Another Home Assistant rabbit hole is ESPhome, which leads to soldering and burned fingers

[xdandevx]

I may have missed this - but a silly blocker for me as a complete newbie to Raspberry Pi 4's and Home Assistant is that the SD card may need to be removed before it can boot via USB (SSD). So after you've put USB Boot via the Raspberry Imager on the SD Card, you've inserted the SD Card into the Raspberry Pi 4 and let it boot to copy the boot-up instructions to the Pi... Turn it off, take out the SD Card and the USB Boot should work.
This took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out why the SSD would not boot up Home Assistant.

[Raress]

Really good tutorial! Starting out with HA now is sooo much easier then when I did it 2.5 years ago lol
It's so good that half a year ago I migrated my HA from Raspberry Pi 2 to Pi 4 w SSD and it took under 1 hour for everything to be back up again with no issues (including Zigbee)

[simonking]

As yet I’ve no reason for home assistant. I’m just loving bellowing commands at Alexa and having a 5 minute argument when something fails! Lol
Paul you are an appreciated legend! Another awesome video!

[HATipsByLarry]

Good job paul. Might I suggest to add the Home Assistant Google Drive Backup add-on. This will backup your HA every few days to your google drive account automatically, keeping all updates and changes you make to HA current in case of a drive failure. Can even set it to delete the old versions so it doesn't take up all your google drive space. But i agree with all you've said and done. Again keep up the good work. 🙂

[davevans]

This is definitely the push I needed to check this out. The final selling point for me was being able to tick what Alexa can detect when you set that side of things up! That'll make it so much simpler setting up all the rooms and devices on 2 accounts. Awesome content my dude \m/.

[rafaelvilla]

Great video Paul, because of this I finally took the leap to HA. One thing though, you may want to note that the SD card should be removed after turning off the Pi and turning it back on to load from SSD. May be common knowledge to HA/RPi pros, but not for a noob like THIS OUT THE HARD WAY :)

[ChrisBoehmvideos]

I have moved from SmartThings to HA three weeks ago and can confirm you will become single due the work in learning all this. This video would have saved me some time starting out as the information is all over place. Some advise I started in Pi3 but has I have 80 zigbee devices it seems to struggle and was getting slow already. I moved this to a Small computer with a celeron processor and like rapid now. If you are deep into automations I recommend getting the right hardware. As Paul said raspberry Pi with and SSD disk should be best for most.

Once your setup and ready to play around more look at trigger IDs - game changer in automation clean up!

[michaeldjjohnson]

Paul, I am so grateful for your tutorial. I have watched it several times and already ordered from your links. Fingers crossed I can get the job done once it all arrives and I put it all together.

[andrewbennett]

Thank you Paul for a very logical and informative video, I needed this 6 months ago when I started my Home Assistant adventure with an Intel NUC, my choice of hardware. You have resolved one issue I had with remote access, I hadn't copied my Nabu Casa url into my companion app 😭, now I have 😀.