I have been looking to automate the boring stuff since at least 2014 when I bought Smartthings. My Smart Home ambitions outgrew that platform pretty fast and I found Home Assistant in the fall of 2015. Since then I have gone all-in on Home Assistant.
The purpose of this channel is to show you ways to eliminate all the BS, and by BS I of course mean boring stuff, using Home Assistant and other Smart Home products and platforms. With that focus, you will find how-to videos, product reviews, tips and tricks, all of it so that automating the boring stuff is easy for anyone.
So, if you are looking to build a smart home stick around because we are about to automate some boring stuff.
Also, come hang out in the Slacker Labs Discord: discord.gg/YkMKGHnahh
Thanks for being part of the Slacker Labs Community!
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Hello, many thx for your youtube video. May I have some help ? I don't know how to establish a calculation made from 2 entities ie: entitie apparent power that divides entitie inverter voltage so as to know the current and declare it as a new entitie. Do you have a simple example? Sincerely
It a server than can help link some devices to home assistant. The easiest solution is to install the mqtt add on in home assistant. No cost. It just enables more things to connect to home assistant.
I feel like still no one knows this so I post as part of my crusade: Windows 10+ has ssh as a native command from both CMD and powershell. you don't need putty anymore!
MY LORD! I am so interested in Home Assistant but I was scared to buy and try because it seemed to complicated. And then I found your video! Thank you! The best explanation there is online is yours!
Mine wont save. Getting "Failed to save add-on configuration, Missing option 'accept_terms' in lets_encrypt in Duck DNS (core_duckdns)". Mine looks exactly like yours at 7:18 in the video, with my information. Any ideas?
Wow, great video, thank you a lot @SlackerLabs ! What about power this device with a battery, directly connected to the raspberry pi internally, and let that be charged wiressly, for example? What is the best battery to choose to do this and also power the speaker correctly? Thank you!
Two main reasons: - I don't mind bricking a Google Home if I screw up. I got three of them used for like $30. - Some of the components you use are either extremely hard to come by outside of the US, or simply much more expensive. To expand on the latter: There are only like 4 or 5 sellers of RPi in Hungary. All of them are completely, 100% out of stock for all RPi Zero models. There are literally none availabe in the country. And even if they _were_ in stock, the price of the bundle you linked for $35, is actually ~$58 for us. I also checked some used sites, but no luck. They are just too niche to have a vibrant market-unlike Homes and Echos. Of course, I could import them myself. But that would make them even more expensive. This would easily become a $100 project just because of the Pi. And that's the thing, this isn't just about the brains, it's about every single part you use. Sure, you could most definitely find a suitable replacement I can buy here locally for a reasonable price, but _I_ can't. Most people who might be interested in doing this, can't. And if I get those exact things, then this is like a ~$300 project I'm looking at just because of all the shipping costs.
Question again. When I go into Home Assistant, under the Preferred Pipeline, I only see "Home Assistant". When I say "Hey Jarvis" the LED's light up but the Assist in progress doesn't change. Is it because I didn't name the Pi Zero "Jarvis-masterbedroom"? I named it "hass-echo-bdrm". Also, the LEDs stay lit up.
Small correction: you do not need a "publicly accessible url" to have SSL working. In order for the SSL to connect without having to install your CA's certificate, it's going to need to be a domain that you own and that a trusted CA will sign, so not .home or .local for example. However, there is no requirement for that certificate, once installed on your local device, to be accessible publicly at all. You can also just use the scp (available in windows by default now if I'm not mistaken) command to upload your files. This way you don't need to install anything.
Thanks for the notes! The publicly accessible url wasn't an ssl requirement though but more of a requirement for what I was trying to do in the automation. And there are some audio things that wouldn't work unless they were over ssl. But this is good information!
@@SlackerLabs oh ok. I don’t see anything in the video that requires anything be publicly accessible, and I’d steer people away from public accessibility wherever possible. A vpn or something like tailscale is much safer for remote access if that is needed (I prefer vpn as I really don’t trust cloud services but that’s just me.) I think the distinction of public accessibility is worth noting though because a lot of people end up getting pushed to opening ports because they think they need it, due to one of the options you have when originally requesting a certificate via LetsEncrypt for example. There are a lot of pieces that come together in the setup process that hint to a beginner tinker that they may need to open ports up and increase their attack surface needlessly.
Thanks to SnazzyLabs for this recommendation! SlackerLabs THANK YOU FOR THIS COOL THOUGHT! Taking analog and "easily" making things digital! There could be some interesting automations I am wondering if this can be connected via LORA with 433ghz? Anyon have thoughts this?
I haven’t tried Lora yet. Most of my use case has been just weather. But by far the most useful one I has is the lightening detector since we have a pool. It goes off before we hear the thunder so we can argue with the kid for 15 mins about getting out
Hi Jeff Where comes the fromZigbee and toZigbee lines coming frome? Those are not in the ikea.ts file. How do you get the text beneath "configure" I'm in the proces to make some converters myself, but that part i'm missing. Thanks in advance!
I tried the Sonoff SNZB-04 Zigbee door/window sensor but do not use those anymore. The battery runs out within a few months, it is hard to replace the battery and the battery contact are too easy damaged during replacement of the battery. I think I'll give the Third Reality ones a go instead.
Congratulations for the video, not only for this one but also for the others you have made, they are really interesting and have often been of help and inspiration to me. I have been observing the evolution of the Switchbot Lock Pro for some time, waiting for it to reach a stable situation with the integration with Home Assistant. Looking around, and your video is proof of this, things now seem stable enough to think about putting it in my house. Looking at the video, however, it is not clear to me how you connected the Switchbot Lock Pro to Home Assistant, in the sense that I saw that you used Meter, but I didn't understand whether via Hub Mini, or directly without the hub. Can you give me more information?
I use home assistant but not the hub. I've got a SONOFF Zigbee 3.0 USB dongle that works fine. I do have to add the Aqara devices to home assistant twice for some reason.
Hi , Excellent video and very helpful especially since it goes step by step for a code illiterate such as me. I encountered a problem: Jul 14 08:55:50 voicepi run[44384]: subprocess.CalledProcessError: Command '['/home/pi/wyoming-satellite/.venv/bin/python3', '-m', 'wyoming_satellite', '--name', 'voicepi', '--uri', 'tcp://0.0.0.0:10700', '--mic-command', 'arecord -D plughw:CARD=seeed2micvoicec,DEV=0 -r 16000 -c 1 -f S16_LE -t raw', '--snd-command', 'aplay -D plughw:CARD=seeed2micvoicec,DEV=0 -r 22050 -c 1 -f S16_LE -t raw--mic-auto-gain', '5', '--mic-noise-suppression', '2', '--wake-uri', 'tcp://127.0.0.1:10400', '--wake-word-name', 'hey_jarvis', '--event-uri', 'tcp://127.0.0.1:10500']' returned non-zero exit status 2. Any suggestions?
This is exactly the guide I was looking for and it's less than 2 weeks old! Great timing. Everything is working beautifully. Now I'm going to add a small display and make a case to fit it all together. Thanks!
@@SlackerLabs Not in my situation, I have HA installed in a Docker on my Pi; HDMI shows up but AV jack doesn’t show up within the config of VLC integration.
If I click on the link and then it take me to my HA and then says this: "This redirect is not supported by your Home Assistant installation. It needs either the Home Assistant Operating System or Home Assistant Supervised installation method. For more information, see the" and takes me to a link how to install HA. Is there a way to fix this?
Nice Video. I have one up and running three months back. Hand crafted a retro style case for it using Birch Plywood. If you want to play music from spotify/youtube music follow the tutorial by futureproofhomes. It works but the small speaker may not give quality output. You may plug it into your music system using the speaker jack.
Thank you very much for this! This is soo much better than the ESPHome device that I tried earlier. That one had so many buffering issues and didn't seem like it had the horse power to run the services. So your solution appears to be working flawlessly. One thing to mention, even if you don't have a speaker you can use the audio jack on the Respeaker 2 Mic Hat to connect an external speaker/mic system with it's own amp and higher quality audio, mic
So tonight I tested using a USB Audio/MIC headset that I use for my daily conferences and plugged this into my pi zero. I changed my Wyoming service to use "CARD=Seri,DEV=0" (Plantronics Blackwire 3220 Seri, USB Audio) for both audio and mic. Not only was the mic allot better than the built-in ones on the audio hat, but the speaker quality was much better too. I am thinking about getting a conference speakerphone to provide a higher quality mic and speaker experience... plus many of these conference speakers have a built-in mic mute button. Thoughts? Have you tried this?
Thank you for putting this tutorial together. I can't see why people are finding this difficult. I had this up and running in less than 30 minutes. Easy Peasy! The one thing that would be great would be to know how I can lower the volume of the speaker output. I used the large speaker and would like to cut the output to about 60% of its current volume.
Does the ReSpeaker require a separate power cable, or will it take power from the Raspberry Pi through the GPIO pins? I only see one power cable on the pictures (from Amazon or their site).
Is it possible to use SimpliSafe "keypad/control panel" with "Alarmo" as local alarm service. I see all the sensor when I added Alarmo in my HA except for the keypad. (Don't see it in hidden sensors also). Can this be done by creating new template?
restarted couple times. Assist Preferred Pipeline does not have jarvis or nabu in it only home asst cloud slow and fast gpt and extended open ai. and Wake word doesn't work where do I look ?
I'm working on a video on how to do this. But you need to make sure you have the whisper add on installed and the open wake word add on installed. And if you want the local text to speech h you will need to install the piper add on. After those are installed there will be 3 integrations to add for whisper, open wake word and piper if you installed that one. After that they should be choices
Jeff, great video. What will you do when Visual Studio for Mac goes away? Use it until it breaks? Find an alternative right away? I'm a complete noob to text editors, and I'm trying to decide between options like Bbedit, Sublime. What's best for light/casual users vs full-on developers? I really like the little code thumbnail on the right. When I wrote Pascal at school, I remember navigating my code by shape.
I'll go back to Sublime Text. That had been my editor of choice prior to VS Code. Its really good, and has a lot of the same features. Actually I should prolly start moving back to that. I dont remember if the HA yaml support is the same as VS Code. Might need to build something.
Uhg, this again. As with local whole home audio from the year before (another half abandoned idea), the year of the voice was a complete and utter waste. Unreliable as all get out. Thank goodness they're actually working on UX improvements now.
I'm not sure what you found to be unreliable. I'm building out commands for mine. I can now walk into a room. Say hey jarvis it's dark in here, and home assistant turns on the lights in the room I am in. And it's completely local. Well except the response back that it turned on the lights in insert room name. The response I'm using Nabu casa.
still don't know what the added value is of "the year of the voice". When all local, it's too slow, bad understanding words,... or you have to invest in more expensive hardware, invest more time to keep it working, ... The method with nabu casa cloud should be faster , but it's .... cloud based. Only to turn on a light???? My google assistant can do this too. It all makes HA more cumbersome,slower,
@@SlackerLabs so, you say 'it's dark in here's in order to turn on lights? And to open roller shutters? 'is's very dark'? It looks like creating a problem for a solution... I just say 'turn on lights', and they turn on. Don't need a complex setup for that.
@@StefanUytterhoeven I think the difference is the privacy aspect. Yep its slower when the entire pipeline is completely local. I have a video coming up that will show the difference in speed. Its always a balance of convivence and privacy. HA gives you more control of that slider. But each end of the spectrum comes with costs. I am not sure Google has the context for me to walk into a room and say turn on the lights, and it just turn on the lights in the room I am. Actually just tried it and it did't work. But that is functionality I built using the HA Voice Assistant. No LLM, no cloud required. I'm not sure there is another platform out there that can do that without using an LLM. But you are right. If Google gives you want you need then there is no value in adding in HA specific voice.
Got it running but it's definitely a bit slow right now and need to get it to be a bit faster to be a viable replacement for all house devices. Will try to figure out how to speed it up. Not sure the best options for that but thinking out loud: - Using a more beefy raspberry pi (v4 or v5) - Sourcing open wake word to the HA server - Sourcing the open wake word to PC with GPU
@@VACInc I have noticed using home assistant cloud to the stt is slightly faster than using faster whisper. But if ha was running on faster hardware locally it should be faster n
I think matter is going to win in 10 years. But the others should last a lifetime. What's gonna suck is having to replace an entire home because your hub breaks and they don't make them anymore.
