I make How to/Tutorials videos about Home Assistant, Smart Home, Home Automation, and IOT because I believe your house should adapt to your lifestyle automatically so that you have more quality time to spend with your loved ones.
Subscribe to my channel if you want to stay up to date about my easy-to-follow step-by-step Home Assistant tutorials that actually work even if you're not that technical. Next to that, I'll keep you updated of exciting new smart home gadgets
My name is Ed. I have over 30 years of IT experience and I am specialized in Home Automation and Home Assistant. If you need my help, please check my website at www.smarthomejunkie.net for Consultancy and Training options.
I am also a musician and study music therapy so as a music therapist I can help people who need mental support.
I would love it if you subscribe to my channel if my videos save you time or if you just like my videos.
What I hate so much is the calendar.list_events error. SHJ - is yr original blueprints/automation/smarthomejunkie/awtrix_list_calendar.yaml file the source of this error? How do you fix it? Will yr ulnazi clock solution work after this new 2024.7 upgrade is loaded? They should have fixed that farcical deprecated calendar call change automatically! Just MO!
Uh adjustable card size looks awesome. Using multiple layers of stack cards and empty cards and so on to make nice dashboard is such a pain. Nice video as always ❤
I definitely appreciate these territorials and look forward to more, thanks. But, the example case seem very silly. If I'm leaving the house and wanted to know if any lights were on, I would rather see where/what light not just a number of lights that are on anywhere in my house... Then have to go find where/what light/s are on because it only tells me "x6 lights are on in the house somewhere". Seems way more logical to have all lights grouped by rooms they are in then check and report what group is still on when leaving. eg, lounge group on means that a light/s is on in the lounge then, hit the 'turn off lounge lights button' - knowing how many lights are on is pointless. That being said, you can set up automation to check when house goes to unoccupied state and turn off lights automatically, making it a truly smart home. If there are specific lights you like to stay on when away, then create a boolean input 'away lights stay on' and configure the automation to turn off all lights except these specific lights if 'away lights stay on' is on.
So. Just add a filter for your area and only the lights in that area are taken into account. I think you can do it yourself based on the tutorials in this series.
it took me half a day to go trough this update, not fun at all. First for some reason this flashing web page did not work for me, dongle was visible but could not connect. Thanks to this I found some other way, there is an add-on that you can flash the dongle, and you don't need to even touch it, directly in HA, it is called "ZigStar Silicon Labs FW Flasher". However this add on was allowing me to flash only the actually recommended by z2m version, which is 7.4.1. ... and z2m didn't start after this. I tried many things, with removing the backup file from z2m folder, rebooting the VM and so on. Finally I have rebooted the machine and re-plug the dongle to different USB port. From this moment it is working.
@@SmartHomeJunkie well this is a start (hopefully). Now we get template helpers, next update perhaps other helpers. Then perhaps we can even build our own devices
@@SmartHomeJunkie I meant the ability to add template helpers to devices. This will probably mean other helpers will be possible to add in later updates
Would love to see the ability to convert an automation into a Blueprint in a future release. Not sure if you got a new camera or lighting, but the picture quality looks great!
Picture quality of this particular camera (e1 outdoor pro) sucks compared to other Reolink cameras of even lesser cameras. Don't know if it's the optics or sensor.. but the picture quality lacks crispness and dynamic range compared to other reolink cameras. I returned mine.
I'd like to convert many of my dashboards to use Sections, but hesitate because Sections are labeled as "experimental". With this new resizing feature, are Sections no longer experimental and it's safe to start using them in earnest?
That's a very useful video, I really like the approach of using labels. Could you give any examples of using 'browser mod' to click on a dashboard icon that shows your 'Lights On' count that then brings up a sub-view listing the light names?
Another great video! Thanks again, it really does open up endless possibilities. One thing I've recently been doing is wrapping this up in a script and passing the label as a variable, so I can ask the same question but for various devices (again all mainly learned from your videos)! I really think you've found your niche in these videos, nothing really out there that helps explain the art of the possible in a simple way! Thanks so much
Many thanks for your video (and the one about sending email notifications using GMAIL). Oddly I can get the Aqara water sensor to email but can't get the thermometer to send an email if the temperature gets above a certain point. My question relating to triggers is do I set a trigger/automation based off devices or entities as the sensors appear under both.
Perfect timing - I was looking how to show how many lights are on within a dashboard. Is it possible to show the names of which ones have the state = ON in a dashboard?
Great video as usual! Thanks for all the work you do! My lights in the house are a mix of light and switches domains. The use of labels is genius and was able to label all entities that are actually lights (either bulbs, switches (L/R), led strips). But i cant figure out how to add the switch domain list with the light domain list before i start filtering for labels and then state.... can you show us how to?
I tried many times and failed to flash my ZBDongle-E with your previous videos via SecureCRT. The stick was no longer recognized properly in Home Assistant and was not recognized at all by the Silabs Firmware Flasher online. But I finally got control of the stick back. I tried with another Windows 10 PC (previously Windows 11) and checked the installed driver. Windows found it on its own (Stick was called in device mngr "USB-Enhanced-Serial CH9102" with COM port specified). While checking the driver in Windows Device Manager, I saw a tab called "Port Settings". The port settings were set to 9600 bps by default and I changed it to 115200 bps. I left the flow control unchanged at "none". After that, the Silabs Firmware Flasher online tool was able to recognize my stick and the update was possible. I don't know if it was the other PC, the other version of Windows or the port setting, but in the end something helped me to be able to do updates online again. Since I've already read that there may be many users who have the same problem as me, I hope that this has given some people some food for thought about how to solve their problem with the stick. I think most important thing was to deinstall silicon labs multiprotocol and zigbee2mqtt and reinstall only zigbee2mqtt with reconfiguration. now my zigbee devices are visible. 🙂
I am using HomeKit to achieve the same without remote access to HASS enabled. It's been working very reliably. I just created a boolean input per person needed tracking in HASS. Then expose the input_boolean to HomeKit using HomeBridge. then create a homekit automation to set the input_boolean as the person arrives/leaves home. I think that's more secure than exposing the HASS server to the internet.
Hi there, Nothing to do with this, but was looking for a way to bui build / store a LIST of items (like the last 5 phone numbers + timestamp) - using an helper ?? Then HOW to display that list on a dashboard ? This would be for a project to display missed calls on my dashboard ... many thanks !
What a great tutorial! I really appreciate the "here's how to design an automation" approach--so much better than a lot of the "watch me do magic" videos that are out there. (Not to knock those latter ones, but for us rookies explaining the "whys" as well as the "hows" is what is needed!) Anyway, thanks! This is very helpful and much appreciated!
Unfortunately, this did not work for me. Flashed to the version in the video, changed the adapter to ember. Zigbee2Mqtt started but all my devices were offline and in the log I saw things like "Failed to ping" and other messages about broadcast failures. I tried flashing a few more times with the latest version on github (7.4.3) and then the version in the video again with no luck. Finally, used the web flasher to go back to 7.3.1, changed the adapter back to ezsp and all my devices were online again. Googled around and found a github issue with a similar problem but no solutions yet. So stuck without ember for now. If anyone has any advice, it would be greatly appreciated.
Once again, you've rescued me from some small amount of pain! I had a speaker that quit announcing for some strange reason and I remembered this video. While working on it, I realized I have two atom speakers that I could tie to a local media player and have made both of them much easier to hear in their respective rooms. Thank you!
I've been trying to get this going on my zbdonglep after finally getting it to be in bootloader mode The TI flash software says Reading file: C:/[path to]/bin/CC1352P2_CC2652P_launchpad_coordinator_20230507.hex. then says Unknown record type: 3 then fails out resetting the dongle which takes it out of bootloader mode and I have to start over. I realize this video is a year old. maybe someone has had this issue and could help me figure out whats happening. Mine is a zbdonglep. is this firmware good to go as is? doesnt seem to be recognized by the TI software. Im going with a different coordinator and wanted to use this one as a router. nevermind pairing this thing as a router isnt apparent either if I ever get the firmware on it. the chip says cc2652 p1f seems like the same chip to me.
This Smart Gateway/Display will make it is so much easier for the average person to begin their HomeAssistant journey. The fact that updates are handled by a single firmware update will make it so much easier for Joe rather than having monthly updates that sometimes break components and then add ons that requiring updates days later. It definitely needs more USBs and possibly a way for POE or just a simple network port. A wall mounting bracket that will make it flush with the wall would be ideal. I already have a HomeAssistant server deployed so this would be stepping backwards but it could be a more solid and stable dashboard overall.
Lost script while updating - can't get it back- tried several times. {{ states.update | selectattr('state', 'eq', 'on') | map(attribute='entity_id') | select('in,integration_entities('esphome')) | list }} this is the script -- can't see what I am missing ----- alias: ESPHome:update all sequence: - repeat: for_each: >- {{ states.update | selectattr('state', 'eq', 'on') | map(attribute='entity_id') | select('in,integration_entities('esphome')) | list }} sequence: - service: update.install data: {} target: entity_id: "{{ repeat.item }}" - wait_template: "{{ is_state(repeat.item, 'off') }}" continue_on_timeout: true mode: single Any pointers Please
