Home automation that's private and local?! (Home Assistant Yellow)

Home Assistant sent me the Yellow, a new smart home hub with a Raspberry Pi CM4 built-in. It includes Zigbee and can be the center of all your smart home automation. But is it worth it?

Here are all the devices I featured in this video (some are affiliate links):

#HomeAssistant #SmartHome #RaspberryPi

Contents:

00:00 - The $1 lightswitch problem
00:49 - Home Assistant Yellow
02:12 - Yellow teardown
03:44 - Zigbee for my office lights
05:48 - Home Assistant 101
07:17 - Zigbee device setup
09:35 - Automating my lights
11:57 - Debugging my failure
13:15 - Actually automating my lights
16:03 - Quick HA review
18:28 - A button, availability, and other options

[atom_]

I think the developers of Home Assistant should take this video to heart, as it perfectly demonstrates how new users interact with it, it is so not intuitive. I tried it several times, it just feels clumsy and instead I did everything in node-red where stuff is predictable, everything that you can control in HA is also possible in node-red.

[TheHookUp]

Pretty fun (and also a little nerve wracking and frustrating), to see you run through everything for the first time as a novice. I found myself saying "no, no, no, YES!" a lot. I honestly think a video like this is super important because once you get familiar with HA it's hard to remember what it was like to be a novice. Cheers and good luck on your HA journey.

[ronodipbasak]

"So it's working. That's a good thing! Why it's working, I'm not 100% sure yet." --- This is so relatable🤣

[DmitarVuckovic]

This is exactly what I have been waiting for after all home automation went cloud based and completely killed my desire to install these into my home. Have zero interest in granting massive companies unfettered access to my personal space. Looking forward to learning from your upcoming projects!

[BrentFreyEsq]

An _occupancy sensor_ might be more useful here than just a simple motion sensor. Motion sensors rely on (relatively) large motion, like walking, whereas an occupancy sensor also uses heat and sound so that if you're in the room and not moving much (like when you're at a computer), it'll still keep the lights on.

[AndrewDanne]

Welcome to the world of Home Assistant. Great to have your analytical mind looking at it as I'm sure you have some great feedback for the dev group. Cheers, and enjoy the Home automation!

[makingtechsense]

As a security minded person I am always incredibly wary of home automation products that call back to unknown servers on the Internet. I think too many consumers are opening their homes up to nefarious and insecure device companies. Thank you for showcasing this. I will definitely be looking into Home Assistant.

[bepstein]

The thing that took me forever to figure out with Home Assistant is there's a big difference between "devices" and "entities". Devices contain entities, ideally one for each "thing" that it does or provides. So your motion sensor is a device, which contains entities for detecting motion, looks like it also does temperature, and probably an on/off status and battery level.

[TheJosh]

Missing step - with a power tester, always check something that's live first! Otherwise your tester might be off/flat/broken and you wouldn't know.

[snowcrash]

FYI from a hopeless Home Assistant Fanboy:
1) Battery operated motion detectors typically have a several minute cool-down before they will detect motion again.
2) Aquara makes a no-neutral zigbee switch! They are relatively new.

[roblatour]

I've labelled all my outlets and light faceplates too. Pro Tip, just mark the backside of them using a sharpie marker with the panel switch number. Sure you have to unscrew the faceplate to see the number, but if you need to know the number you are likely going to be taking off the faceplate anyway.

[tutoralcom]

Him asking "what's Home Assistant?", as I'm getting my own set up in my house brought me joy today.

[haus_automation]

1:49 I feel you! Still don't know why so many people build a "cloud home" with a bunch of different apps and cloud servers involved. Connected over other cloud servers like IFTTT or Alexa. Feels strange to involve 3 different servers to switch the lights on 😅

[henkondemand]

When you said "I'm not going to do this" after the light switch demonstration, and then proceeded to suggest a needlessly complex solution. I loved that.

[scottmacwatters]

I recently got into Home Assistant and watching your raw reactions using it for the first time is hilarious. It’s also probably very informative for anyone working on the HA UX as your reactions matched almost exactly with mine when I was starting.

If you get a chance, can you try to figure out and explain the zigbee clustering UI? It’s a mystery to me.

[notherealmarco]

13:06 The reason is that the state of the sensor is still "on", which in this case means "motion detected". Normally to change the to "off" it has to stay at least 1/2 minutes (but it depends on the sensor) without detecting motion.
Having a sensor that sends Zigbee message every 5 seconds will drain it's battery faster!

[rullywow]

Welcome to Home Assistant! Along with my NAS, and Raspberry Pi it has been responsible for some of my Linux journey in the last few years. I was wondering when you might venture into HA. I bought your Ansible book and am using it to automate all the things! Keep up the great content!

[code]

Your videos have such a clear presentation style -- your speaking voice, the editing, the lack of distractions (intros, outros, music, sponsors, etc.) -- that make me wish you would make videos on other topics (non-tech) that I'm interested in.

[lentilgod]

Love that you show the learning process, and that just like us, you sometimes dive into something without a clue about how it works 😄

[bufordmaddogtannen]

OMG Jeff, that $1 switch is a genius invention. With a pulley and some phishing lines, you could control the lights from your desk. 😂🤣👍🏻