 And welcome to homelab show. Oh the homelab show got it the full we're sent in here, right? And now this is episode 20 and this comes out of Me asking a question about what's the best tool because well Jay already knows and that's why he's gonna be leading a lot of this Discussion here, and I was excited. He shared a screen I'm gonna talk about home assistant and I have avoided as much as possible any IOT stuff And every time someone brags about their studio setup and things like that you watch a video And all the automations some tech youtubers talking about it's not about homelessness And it's about oh I tied it to insert name of your favorite cloud provider And then in some case if you go back a little bit through the history of these devices I think it was maybe home depot one of the companies had sold a lot of devices And then the company that was running the cloud got bought by another company and they dropped all the support and you know All the devices quit working because if there's no cloud controller also privacy concerns all your data being there versus well You know in your control and what if someone takes over that cloud and it's externally accessible and this flips your light switch is on and off or More dangerously cranks the heat up or turns the heat off or any of those functions that you may have tied to this and This is where it's fun where we're gonna talk about home assistant. I'm just excited like if you couldn't tell There's gonna be a lot of fun Subtopics that are included in that and of course security and privacy is definitely going to be a part of that because you have to consider Those things if this is a direction you want to go down So yeah, we absolutely are looking forward to talking about this And one more because someone said this in the comments, but me and Jay laughed about this So we actually did the show notes on Monday prior and we don't I don't really I mean I know of the channel of course everyone knows who Linus tech tips is but I'm not like a regular watcher and When I started doing some of the notes We actually realized that Linus had released a video the same day what we put the notes together for this show So it is a coincidence With Linus tech tips at all Yeah, you know what's funny about that is You know, I love doing YouTube videos as everyone knows but the biggest downside about doing YouTube videos is that I don't get a chance to Consume the content that I like, you know that from other people videos that other people do I don't get a chance to do that so I can't remember the last time I watched a video from Linus and Honestly, it's probably been a year Or even one of your videos have like at least two or three of your videos on my watch later list one of them being the great Long videos so I need to get that done then also the retro gaming videos I'm into all of that just goes by the way Said I don't know what you or which youtuber is doing what you know I don't know what they're up to these days So when Tom posted the video right after we decided to do home assistant or a link that Linus this video I'm like really like oh boy. Okay. We promise. That's a coincidence, but yeah Yeah, it is and Tom was here at the studio the videos were already uploaded when he was here And he got to see some of this in person and then we were doing a screen share the other day And then he's like, why don't we do an episode on this like, okay? Let's do it. So yeah But first we've got to talk about Linode because And that's an important thing but Linode is awesome. I don't take sponsors lightly There's a vetting process and when they partnered with learn Linux TV to do You know sponsored ads on there. It's like, well, yeah, I'm already using you guys. So it's a big win for me It's kind of easy to talk about something that you're already using and They are the platform of choice for all the web-facing websites for learn the next TV as well as this podcast So when we tell you to go in, you know, take advantage of the free credit to get your account started It's not like we're one of those youtubers or you know Content providers that hate the product and it's like what we got to mention it because the thing No, we like it. We actually use it and you are using it as well if you are on our website So we're drinking the Kool-Aid Linode is awesome They have a marketplace one-click apps to get you going you can set up custom Linux servers even arch Linux which I love that so much like who else gives you access to an arch Linux server We have to take a moment Yeah, yeah But can we just think about for a minute like how much maintenance must go into Providing you everyone an image for arch Linux that they're gonna have to continually update that I'm sure that's no small task And I want a meme now that says by the way, Linode supports arch insert joke here Capitalized on this and say hey, I run arch and put that right on their website Just wear the t-shirts and just totally make people know that but Yeah, the really great things to say about Linode so definitely check them out Yep, so we have offer code down below if you're interested sign in for load to get you started to get you a few hours under servers and some Time so it's definitely for a lot of products We talk about if you need something in the cloud and there would be an upcoming video about some cloud things too And I have a couple ideas for some future videos about running your own VPN Of course because you've noticed me and Jay as he said we don't take sponsors lately We also don't show other VPN companies all the time because I think they're a little Oversold a bit and what's all we'll say about that for now Me about a year ago, and I was thinking about doing it, but then I'm like Yeah, but if they get breached Honestly, that's gonna be a lot of work to go back through all the videos and just warn everyone if that happens And I'm not trying to do that So that's kind of hard to partner with the VPN company because they might be great right now But maybe you know next week you get that in the news and not so good Speaking of content though. Oh, yeah, we'll get to that real quick But I do want to give you guys a quick announcement a little teaser I'm going to announce right now that I am doing a proxmox series on learn Linux TV. It's filming right now There's gonna be at least 15 or 16 episodes It might there might be more might be less by the time I get them edited, but I think it's gonna be around 16 I'm about 10 episodes deep in the filming process right now So as soon as I get the filming process done, which is actually going to wrap today I'm going to start editing those videos and they might even be on the channel within the next two weeks So just stay tuned for that a lot of people have been asking for this I've done proxmox videos before but this is a little bit more in-depth. I don't remember how many episodes I had in the last series I think four or five just a guess. I mean there's 15 or 16 in this one So it's going it's gonna go pretty deep. So just stay tuned for that and now we could talk about home assistant Well, we also should let you know for those of you looking to contact us reach out and feedback for the show We do have the feedback form set up on the homelab.show website And we'll have it linked down below and as someone pointed out because we announced it last time I had the I had things broken. They're all fixed. They were fixed within if you listen to the last show About 10 minutes after a show. I fixed the URL because I accidentally set it to private when we were in testing. So We want two things for you guys that are listening. Number one, we want your questions We want to do a Q&A episode. We can only do that if we have enough questions We were looking at it last night. We had some good questions on there But we don't really feel like we had enough to justify a Q&A episode I think you guys can help with that So if you want to submit some questions, definitely do that and also as well if you have any topics You think we should cover you can go ahead and suggest those not as important because obviously we'll get to those Suggestions for sure, but the more immediate need is the questions that you guys might have so if you have this weird situation You don't know why it's not working Something we didn't answer before or may not have answered before just go ahead and put your question there Yeah, and each is a and if you want to have a more engaging discussion both of us have forums So if there's a video you watched of ours, you can go over to our forums And also that's kind of a more back-and-forth public discourse But if it's just general questions, you can feel free to use the form and that's about it All right. Now let's talk about the home assistant home assistant So this is one of those projects that I really love For many reasons and it's also one of those things I wasn't sure if we were going to cover because it kind of home assistant sets in between You know home lab and non-home lab. I mean just your normal home automation That's what it's for but there's some overlap here If you if you have a home lab, you might be interested naturally in automating your light bulbs I mean after you automate your servers, maybe you might want to automate your light switches and all those other things too Why not? Why not automate all the things and home assistant is missing piece of that puzzle? But I mean yeah, is it home is it home lab related? Yes and no at the same time but I think it's one of those things that we kind of do need to address and One another thing you could do is automate your you know servers and things like that with it too You can have it automatically power on servers if you want power them off. It supports wake on land There's all kinds of things that can do But let's rewind a little bit and talk about what the heck home assistant even is in the first place for those people that don't know So home assistant is an application and a Linux distribution in a container. It's all those things So I know that's confusing. So what home assistant itself does is allows you to Basically automate your home. So if you have, you know, smart bulbs smart plugs or whatever smart devices that you might have Home assistant's goal is to give you one dashboard to automate those things So you could have a dashboard for your office your den your bedroom kitchen And have controls in each of those dashboards that allow you to toggle things on toggle things off But it goes beyond that because you can add your thermostat on there You could also synchronize things to the sunrise and sunset cycles in your area So for example here at my house, we have a light in the yards on a on a pole So it just lights up the driveway basically and it was such a pain because it was connected to this this weird apparatus That's really old and it's just hard to figure out how to change the time when daylight savings occurs So I just had the wire cut put it into a smart plug and put it in home assistant and then in home assistant I tell it that when sunset happens. I want it on and when sunrise happens I wanted to go off and I never have to set it again. I never have to worry about it So those are some of the things you could do and there's so many more things because if you could think about it It could probably do it Well, and let's start with the hardware because one of the things that was a little bit confusing to me and You run yours on a Raspberry Pi am I correct Jay? I did. Yeah, not anymore. So right now I'm running it as a Proxmox VM. Okay, so that's a little bit more complicated I'll explain how I have that set up just a moment, but let's go back lower level just so people can understand. So the easiest way to Get started with home assistant is Raspberry Pi. They have an entire operating system You can just flash onto an SD card and that's it. You just put the SD card in there Set a static IP or static lease for your Raspberry Pi and you're all set. You have home assistant It's all set and ready to go Underneath the hood. It's using containers, which is pretty cool. It's pretty smart about that too There's the supervisor component that you know handles the management side of things They call it the I think they used to call it has OS So yeah, no S but I don't really think they're using that name anymore It's home assistant operating system, but it may as well be has OS at this point So you can download that onto an SD card they have images for virtual box for other virtualize or virtualization solutions out there and They also have and I have it pulled up on my computer I believe but they have a home assistant blue. I believe it's called. Yeah, that's what it is So for 140 us dollars you can buy this blue box that I don't have one Spoiler I might be getting one it's kind of in the beginning stages of the discussion right now I might be able to review this I don't know if it's going to happen But if you don't really feel like setting up a Raspberry Pi and going through all that you can just purchase the home Assistant blue it is a hundred and forty dollars is what I'm seeing here It's running on an O droid and two plus so four gigs of DDR4 and 128 gigs of EMMC storage As I'll go ahead I'll just say in as well If you when you go down to the download and set up on there They have a long list of the different devices they support O droid being on their Raspberry Pi They there's a handful of like the single board computers that they support So you can kind of pick your platform and they do have And Jay will probably talk more about this I don't know if you downloaded the VM image, but they have VM images including one for Proxmox Yeah, well the funny should mention that so That either didn't exist or I wasn't able to find it when I went through and set it up on Proxmox So it wasn't easy for me. So now that they have a Proxmox images. I'm sure it's gonna be easy I ended up finding a github project Which I pretty I can't remember which one or what it was named But basically allows you to SSH into your Proxmox server and it's like a curl command Which I know curl commands are bad But you know, I've added it I looked at it look fine and I ran it and what it did actually is pretty cool Is it created a template for home assistant right in Proxmox? So then I have the template of the Unconfigured home assistant and then I just create a created an initial VM from that template and then that's what I use now But now that they have an image that's you know for Proxmox I think that's going to be a lot easier for people and you know I'm hoping I'm hoping at least you won't have to go to do that curl command. So that's what I'm using it on right now now Not to get we need to talk about security a little bit. We could talk about it more later But just kind of like it a quick summary I don't trust IOT devices and I'll think anyone should so I have a VLAN on my network That is for IOT devices so the smart TVs all that they don't have access to the rest of the network or the devices They can get out to the internet. That's all they can do now home assistant is kind of unique because You know, it's a IOT device But you also need to control it too You need to get out get on your web browser access it and you know configure it and impress the buttons Otherwise if you can't access it, what's the point? So the way I set it up is that it has two network interfaces on the VM It has one to the standard management interface that I can access to the desktop It's not going to allow cross traffic there Well, I mean it kind of does kind of doesn't we're getting into subnetting and permissions of firewall rules at this point But long story made short it has a connection to the IOT network So home assistant is the only exception here It connects I can access it through my desktop and it can access the IOT devices So it's kind of like a bridge between the two things This is very complicated and most people won't need to do this But if you have a way to keep it separate at least for your IOT devices themselves I do recommend that because a lot of times I mean you really don't know what the firmware is doing on these things So it's probably just a good idea to keep them separate Yeah Now and I will segue a little bit here because Jay is not running it this way But the way I ordered parts and I will be doing a video in the future but we did just reading I ordered the Setups so we're gonna be using Z wave with my home assistant and what that is this is there's two different protocols Like B and Z wave and they both work off of a USB dongle that you can plug into the home assistant system So this is where I'm running mine on a Raspberry Pi We plug in the Z wave device and then all instead of being a like an IOT network that connects to your Wi-Fi They instead will connect to your Z wave devices So this creates like a separate network where all the Z wave stuff now I'm going to have to do a deeper explainer and I asked her reading enough about Z wave and ZigBee It could probably be its own episode on those protocols I realized but in short it's a different way of interacting so the way Jay is set up They're all connected to his Wi-Fi network the the smart plugs and different devices and simultaneously His home assistant is connected to that same subnet therefore it can talk to those If you do it something like a ZigBee or Z wave device That's a separate network and then you're bridging that network via that So the devices don't need to be or have anything to do with your Wi-Fi As a matter of fact, you can build if you have a Z wave system You can have no Wi-Fi at all. I believe the same for ZigBee You could just connect everything hard line such as a Raspberry Pi hard lined it And what I don't have a clear answer But it's obviously very debated in the forums and it's gonna take me buying some parts to do is people are going to know what's the most compatible which sort of best ones to run and For both B and J that becomes a complicated topic and it's also a complicated topic within there So we're not going to spend a ton. We'll talk about a little bit But it's something that we're not going to be able to dive in depth than just for brevity and scope of this particular podcast Right. So, yeah, we do have a little bit, but I agree. I think Before we talk about that it's important to understand integrations because that's what makes home assistant Do what it does it can integrate with different things and home assistant by itself without integrations It can do some stuff, right, but it can't do much. So You have two choices Generally, you can have a device with custom firmware, which is great Firmware, I mean, you don't have to worry about it. I'm being naughty if you have a firmware and it's open source Which is great or it could just tie into another platform. So That's why it's a little complicated but To summarize it if you have a thermostat like the Honeywell or an ecobee for example It has an integration for Honeywell. It has an integration or ecobee Regardless of which one of those you purchase and there's many others that you can buy you install the integration for that thing And then if you are, you know, I don't know Phillips U lights or whatever it is. You're using you look for an integration for that So you can you decide basically do you want to just buy something from Amazon? That's a certain platform and then hook home assistant into that you could do that There's nothing wrong with that inherently by default. That's fine Or do you want to go through the extra work and look for these devices that you can write custom firmware to or jailbreak? So to speak that's going to be more work Of course, I decided to do that more. Yeah, but You know, you have that choice now as Tom mentioned earlier you I mean there is a cat and mouse game here because a lot of these If not most of these manufacturers, they don't want you to do that They don't want you to have full control over the devices. So And this has happened to me. It's like I have a platform. I purchased it I was able to look customs custom firmware on these things and then I order another set from Amazon like a year later And then I can't I can't jailbreak and break them right now because they added something in the firmware And now the tools that I've been using to hack them They need to get updated to support this and I'm sure they're working on it. It just takes time It's a cat and mouse game. Do you want to be in on that cat and mouse game or just buy something that you know set it and Forget it. Yeah You you have to make the decision for yourself just how much work you want to put into this and how Important custom firmware might be for you. Yeah, and to expand on that a little bit an example is going to be the TP link I can't remember the exact models. They are but this is where it gets a little bit confusing They have some home automation devices They have ones that without connecting to TP link TP links cloud servers where they normally would reside You can have home assistant talk to them directly on a network But then if you bought them and follow the forums further at some point There is a firmware change. They made that broke home assistance ability to talk to them But then you have to go find the old firmware which apparently few people have linked to and available in the forums and downgrade it So there's two ways home assistant can talk to a device native and local There's one option so the device is on your network and it talks to locally You can talk to it of course through the as I mentioned before the ZigBee or Z-Wave protocols Those are other ways you can have it talk to it Then you can talk to it through API's and I'll throw that out there because this is kind of an interesting Thing that I've learned how it works as well. It can talk to my Tesla Not natively as if my Tesla my car is on the same network No, but you can get my Tesla API key and my Tesla talks to Tesla cloud And then home assistant Tesla included has a long list of Cloud services it supports so home assistant runs inside of your network or wherever you put it But then can reach out through API calls to talk to other devices that may not be able to talk locally to it This is why it's kind of like at some point I'm gonna have to create like a visual graph of all the ways it can connect to try and break down But it's one of those things is it's you kind of surprised all the lists of support And the good news is they have good documentation or sites You can really type in something you may already have if you're thinking about getting home assistant like eco bees I believe nest was even in there Even though we can't talk natively to nest it'll talk through Google's API that talks to nest so you can have levels of integration with it That doesn't really solve your privacy concerns You may have with something like a nest but it does give you levels of control for those pick your devices Yep, and that's a decision. That's that's part of the process, right? You want it You want to get this going our goal is into You know tell you guys that it's so much work is so much research to go into this to make you like not want to you Definitely should check this out But to keep it simple just make your decision. Do you want custom firmware or not? How much do you trust the manufacturer of the devices that you're thinking about buying? You can just ask some questions or just better yet search the forums for home assistant because Maybe someone's already asked and you and the answer is right there You're thinking about you know product X you want to get that and someone's already tried it out And this is their experience then it might not actually take that much work Yeah, now quick side note on when Jay says custom firmware good news is there's documentation on how to do this There are a couple Pins essentially you have to gain access to on some of the plugs And then you connect in and you we can either solder to it or if you have a little micro clips You can clip on to the pins that are on there and then there are tools out there to flash these custom firmwares So not all the devices that I looked up make for act to seem like the majority ones I looked up just required you to jump for these pins and push a firmware to it So it's not it sounds daunting because if you've never done that before that's obviously scary But it's actually kind of cool Watching at work, and I did find a few people if you just type in like the device you're looking at There's people who have some pretty basic YouTube videos to show you where the pins are or just forum posts with pictures And you see what to do and then the cables you need to connect to your computer to push the firmware and Reflash these plugs because there's a common. I don't even know if it's open source, but at least a common operating system I can't believe of it. It's got like tailo something. Is it tailo? It's got a strange name. Sorry. I'll leave it in a show notes down below But it's it's how you actually swap the firmware on them Yeah, I used a tool called to your convert to you why a convert. Yeah, that's it That one didn't require any wiring or breaking things open or anything. It was you know, just follow the instructions You just it's like you join a Wi-Fi network on a smartphone and use your smartphone to bridge something I don't know how exactly it works But you just follow the instructions with a smartphone and with this thing that you download from github you execute a script You're connected on your smartphone and then you push the firmware. So it's when it works It's easy when you can't do something like that That's when you start to have to break out some cables and back to blade and whatever else you need to break into the device Literally break into the device. Yeah, physically physically break it Well, you just take it apart and there's instructions how to take them apart Taz Moda is the firmware software. That's that word. It was a tip on my tongue ESP home in addition to that so there's two I use the ESP home There's no specific reason for that. It's just flip a coin. Okay, that's what I went with Yeah, and it's what works with your device is obviously what you have to go with Yeah, which is true a lot of times. That's the case. I guess with mine. You can go either way actually but that's not common So, you know, just choose accordingly. So One thing that I think is a deciding factor that that everyone needs to take in a consideration You're buying devices is whether or not it supports power monitoring So I personally will not buy a smart plug or a smart device that doesn't support that because It's so cool like every smart plug in the house supports this So I know how much you know how much in watts power is going through everything So I could tell you how much power my office is using or my turtle tanks even I mean I got it on everything So if I want to know why my power bill is so high I can literally just go to the actual room that's using the most power and Get a graph and look at that which is just so cool to be able to do that But if your smart plugs don't support power monitoring then you won't be able to do that Another thing is to know how many amps you are pushing through a plug or a socket Because if you buy a smart plug that doesn't support that much there that amount of power bad things are gonna happen So just keep in mind if you have a kilowatt meter or a general idea of what kind of power is going through something Just match that with the specs on the thing that you're thinking about buying just to make sure you're not trying to overload something So there's a few tips on when you're buying things Yeah, and you want to make sure you can most of them have the amperage It seems like a lot of them by default are 15 amps is the majority ones I seen and you always want to go Over so you want to have a device that supports more than the amperage you plan to push through that particular device You don't want to risk it and also as we know with some of the more off-brandy type things That may they may seem 15 amps. I don't know that that's been verified I do know there's some foreign posts about ones that melted Just charge your Tesla through it and see if it survives. Yeah, see if that survives, you know Let's put 40 amps through it. Yeah If it stands that that test then I think we're all right, so So now we can kind of get into some more of the other sides of Home assistant that I like so much. So The dashboard is great. I'm blanking on the name of the dashboard. Honestly, or what it uses but At first you get like one dashboard. It's like all the things and it's just super cluttered It's like they're like 20 smart plugs and you know thermostat and all these things They're all on this one page, but you can literally create a dashboard for each room in your house So you can have one for your office. You're down your bedroom Whatever you want to do you could you could decide that on my end I have you know one for every room But you could also do tabs on your dashboard too So I have power usage current as a tab and power usage daily as a tab so I can on the first tab I could toggle things on and off the second tab I could see what their power they're using right now third tab a little history about the power usage And it works for me like that, but you can get as creative as you want or just set it and forget it and use it as it is But if you think about it, you could have all of your lights in the house aligned to the Sun You know sunrise and sunset. It's not just like the outside light that I mentioned, right? So you could have your den lights turn on when it's you know sunset You could have them turn on and be about 50% brightness and then as the you know As it gets darker outside the lights increase in brightness And then if you're never awake at 1 a.m. You can cut all the lights off in your house And then you'll find yourself not really reaching for light switches ever because it just happens and that's just such a great thing Another thing they can do is hook into televisions so you could turn on your television through home assistant as well Now, of course, I don't know about you if I'm sitting in the den I'm not trying to get up walk into the office You know boot the computer open home assistant just to turn the TV on it's faster to reach for the remote But if you have a tablet or or even a Raspberry Pi with a screen You could you could create a wall mounted and I plan on doing this I haven't done it yet, but you can create a wall mounted Star Trek style dashboard touch screen with home assistant loaded and just tap the lights in the room Turn on the TV turn off the TV turn on the lights turn off the lights So that's pretty cool and in my case in the recording studio all the lights are on that So I could I could do that turn the lights on and off. I have a LED on-air recording light that I could turn on but another thing you could do is set up a scene which is Basically kind of like a collection so I could create a scene called recording time and it could turn on the TV Wake on land my recording PC turn on my studio lights and turn on that red on-air recording LED as well and do all of that if my camera was able to hook into it I could probably have that automated as well But you can go pretty deep into this and you'll be surprised just how many devices actually integrate with home assistant They're really doing a great job with integrating to all the things as much as they can Well, and let's go a step further You can chain events together and if you're not familiar with like tools such as if this then that it's a very similar But you get to host it in your home assistant You could set up motion monitors for example There's a lot of devices outside of just smart plugs or smart monitoring I can do but you could set up motion devices that do things like Hey, we've noticed motion is room Activate these things so you can see activate the lights in that way when you are out of a room instead of just having a normal Motion light you can set up rules of it. Do you even mention too? You can have it look for your phone pinging something on the network. Oh, yeah Presence detection presence detection it says when your phone joins the Wi-Fi network turn everything on when your phone leaves the Wi-Fi network You're clearly have left the building or whatever you can start turning things off So when it doesn't detect a device attached to the network It says well you left the home But you left the lights on nobody's home because I can't ping any phones and we'll start turning things off That's provided you rely you won't just turn your phone off for privacy reasons when you get home because you know Something might be listening Yeah, but you can other thing you do there too with presence detection if you have an AC which I think a lot of us do right now because of summer You don't need that, you know really cool chill wind going through your house when nobody's home to enjoy it You can have the AC assuming you don't have pets that have temperature requirements. You can literally just oh, yeah I don't care the temperatures 80 degrees in the house when I'm not home. Who cares? I'm not home, but you can make it so that when you walk in the door AC kicks on Close down the house so that way you're not paying for heat for air conditioning that you are not using right now and You can wake on land your servers if you want to so if you have a home lab And you're not home maybe because that I'm set it up to gracefully shut down your servers So you're not actually using power in your servers assuming that you don't have backup jobs that are scheduled to run in a certain time You just have it shut down everything nobody's home when you get home everything comes back on so using home assistant Let that way paired with power monitoring you can actually potentially lower your power bill and maybe even home assistant will pay for itself Yeah, and I've been seeing there's some humidity sensors So you can go chain more things together Where you have humidity sensors combined with some other sensors to create events based on that Do we turn an extra fan on some level of circulation and for people like myself? Especially my old house. We are in an edge of a floodplain essentially So making sure that there was no moisture in certain areas of the house when we had the heavy rains because we've even followed the weather Like me and J. Do here in Michigan. We've had some flooding Being able to monitor for that with your home assistant and you know send alerts to you These it's some really cool stuff that you can do on there. Yeah, I don't I don't know about you I actually don't pay attention to the weather at all. We have four seasons cold cold or cold is in hot here in Michigan That's those are our seasons in construction But but yeah, I mean you can use home assistant some really creative ways And it's one of those things and this is what I love the most you keep finding new ways or new things to do with it It just starts with a few smart plugs. Okay, that's great Then you buy more spark plugs and you buy smart balls and you're buying this and you're buying that you can buy it over time You don't have to buy anything all at once But you'll find yourself kind of coming up with some new ideas Which is actually great someone in a chat room mentioned lovelace as the name of the dashboard or that the type of dashboard that this Uses which is true. So thank you several people mentioned that so that's the type of dashboard that it uses you can create a bunch of dashboards in there and a couple other things I want to mention there's a store where you can download third-party things if there's something That's not covered by an integration My favorite is the Google Drive backup. It's my favorite, but it's also not I don't really like Google Drive to be honest but Home assistant is kind of hard to back up via conventional means because what I think about is I have true nas and Home assistant itself has a backup utility built-in that will take a backup of itself and that backup is great because you can literally You could just install home assistant restore that backup. That's it. It's it's that good It has literally everything in there problem is, you know You have it on an SD card or whatever your home assistant device is using the disk dies You lose the backups along with home assistant So you want to get those backups somewhere else and and this is one thing that I feel like home assistant doesn't really make easy Unfortunately because what I think about is oh, I'll just set up a cron job That'll are sync the backup folder along with all the backup files within it to my true nas Nightly so that way I don't worry about it. I could just restore it when I need to the problem is SSH is disabled by default, which is great But it continually disables SSH over and over again And it's unreliable because I guess they just hate SSH and they want to kill SSH at any possible Like I had a monitor for SSH is like it's down again after log in go into the console Started at least at the time I tried there was no option to automatically start I think there was but they took it off So I'm like, okay Well, there's no our sync protocol are built in at least when I looked originally that I could use like no Our sync daemon to use so I just didn't have any more time to look they have a Google Drive backup You install that if you are a fan of Google Drive, you love it It'll literally just grab everything in your backup folder and make sure that that's synced up to Google Drive So at least you have that off-site backup for that if that's something you want to do it Yeah, it makes it hard to roll your own backup system, but it you know, just keep that in mind another thing that I Want to mention I want to make sure everybody knows because there's a really hilarious story about this, right? ESP home is what I use like I mentioned for custom firmware if it doesn't detect a Wi-Fi connection It reboots itself. There's a way around it. I implemented it. It didn't really work out so what that means is if my Wi-Fi drops then During a certain interval or whatever it's going to restart like all the smart plugs will reboot They don't detect an IP address or a ping or anything. They just reboot. It's just how it is So what's funny is I flashed custom firmware to all of my smart plugs and it worked. There was no error I didn't brick anything. I was like I feel I was feeling great that feeling when oh my gosh It worked. It's so cool I got custom firmware and all the things and it was so easy to do and then you know It's 8 o'clock me and the kids want to play some video games So I turned on the ps5 it's time to play some PlayStation and I am lucky enough to have a ps5 So we're they're really excited to play it for the first time actually and we sit down and the TV cuts off and Then the PlayStation cuts off And then the lights in the office cut off and then they cut back on my the power to my desktop cuts off It goes back on the server rack off on off on next thing You know every single smart plug in the house is power cycling and at first I didn't know what was going on So I'm like that's weird. I turned the PlayStation back on cuts off again. What and then everything else is cutting off again So here I am sitting down. It's time for some leisure time leisure time completely defeated and what I discovered is that if there's no Wi-Fi signal it restarts But why wasn't there a Wi-Fi signal because I also flashed the smart plug that's connected to my UPS that's connected to my internet gear and when I flashed the firmware on that smart plug What happens is that it defaults to turning off so you have to go in and manually turn it on the first time But it turned off but everything was working fine. I tested it. I go to dinner Well, of course everything is working fine the power cut off But I have a UPS as soon as that battery drained Unified access points went down Unified switches went down everything on the server rack lost access Obviously, it was easy just go ahead and flick it back on but you can imagine how frustrating it was to find out the hard way That if it doesn't detect a Wi-Fi signal it'll reboot everything. So just you know now You know, so if that happens to you things are Clicking on and off just immediately suspect your Wi-Fi connection has some kind of issue. So yeah, definitely a problem there and To touch on a little bit more some of the automation tools as you can do on there One of the things I I will probably diving into when I get the videos done on Homeless, so we'll first set it up and then do some more diving into is UPS control. I seen was in there I don't know if you've tested that but you can then have your power systems with the UPS To get notifications But then also create a series of triggered events to shut down or power off things based on the condition of your UPS system So if you have a server rack and you want to be able to do this and then you tie home Assistant to be able to shut off certain devices and this can you know scale upwards if you want to reduce the amount of Power draw overall in your house is one of the things that I've thought about doing at home Big project stuff is actually putting a battery backup at my house Because we water new house that's one of the things instead of a generator I was actually thinking hey we could go battery backup But we also have to make sure if you're on that we put everything down to a minimum power So it lasts longer and I'm looking at building my own Tesla power wall But I don't know if that's gonna be a homelab video or not I might do a channel about it But yeah, that's a way way out of scope project But it's still because there's so much tying and integration for so many different power monitoring things I think it's kind of cool how you can build a intelligent and also a System by which you could actually manage your smart home all inside of something you host yourself Yeah, and it's that you mentioned it I'm not using the UPS features of home assistant But the way I had it set up or I have it set up is the UPS the USB cables actually plugged into my PF sense box Because PF sense has an APC UPS app built into it So that's able to email me as soon as there's a problem with the UPS I don't remember why I didn't know that like either wasn't checking my email I think there's actually a problem with the email server that I was using at the time Because I have an SMTP server in PF sense that it uses to send outbound mail I don't remember what the issue was at the time I did have that automated to where I was alerted if there's a power issue But for whatever reason that particular day. Yeah Maybe I should test my my gear better actually, but not my finest moment for sure Gotta be kind of humorous, you know It's just like you can just picture me just saying all kinds of swear words that you never hear me say on the air Over and over again really upset. It's time to play games and I'm boiled But then being a really simple problem and it's just two things like I mentioned it loses Wi-Fi connection It restarts but also When you flash the custom firmware it defaults to off as soon as it power cycles So it is what it is now something else. It's in there, too Is location tracking? I noticed it has the ability to grab data from different devices I mentioned it because it's something listed in the Tesla one and if I'm not mistaken There's ways you can do geo fencing in there to trigger location versus one in action occurs. Is that correct Jay? I'm not sure, but I think so so that's a perfect example I'm glad you brought it up because that's kind of how the workflow works so you start with a smart plug or two or whatever and You then you graduate to you know at first year It's cool You could just turn it on and off by clicking the button in the interface and you graduate to scheduling that great And then you graduate to maybe setting up presence detection So now it knows when you're home and then maybe you graduated again to something like GPS or whatnot So it seems like everything kind of just naturally builds like you implement the things and then after a while There's just like this natural path that home assistant just goes on and it's just if you enjoy Automating things it just gives you like this endless enjoyment because there's just so many different tips And just when you think that you figured it out and you have it all set up You hear about someone else in a blog or a podcast a YouTube video or something and you hear about what they're doing Like I want to do that too and then just implement what they're doing in yours And then it's just like the gift that keeps on giving and I think that's why it's so popular for home lab users Because we like these projects that give us something fun to work on but also keeps building on itself and just gives us Repeated enjoyment from yeah And you know you could build a lot of stuff for automation around things like gardening And I bring it up neither me and I'm pretty sure Jay's not a gardener either Actually, but not right now, but I will be yes. Yeah some point well We all that's where we all plan to go and retire as tech people were like All right, we've had enough of this industry. We're all just gonna go live on a farm with our friend Phil The farming stuff though, there's a lot of as the reason I'm bad at plants is they need constant attention And apparently I don't give them that these are where I've seen some cool projects that get me excited Like I could be a tech gardener because if you build automation around it It has that ability to detect it's like, you know what this needs to be watered and you tie that together Like Jason you go down the rabbit hole of why not get a moisture texture? Why not detect how much moisture is in the soil so it doesn't overwater it because maybe it was going to rain and then It goes ahead and does all that or maybe you tie in weather prediction If it predicts rain skip the watering because even though the water saturation is not good now We're predicting rain and then go back and check that it's oh boy. You can build some fun stuff with this Yeah, there's so many things you can do and I just love it. I know I'm there's a lot of things I'm forgetting and as soon as we stop recording. It's like, oh my god I can't believe I didn't mention this or mention that it's something that I do recommend If this does interest you that you get started I think like the easiest way to get started is to buy some smart plugs I mean you could buy smart outlets and actually change the outlets in your house If you know how to do that and you know how to you know, do that safely Definitely go for it But it's probably cheaper just to buy a few smart plugs You can usually get a pack of four or something like that and then if you already have a raspberry pi Then you're most of the way there already you could just load a home assistant OS on that and Get that going if you want to or just buy that blue box that they sell if you want to go that direction But I think that's probably the easiest way to go and after you get the hang of setting up those plugs Then you can I don't know maybe add some smart bulbs to it And then if you want to change your outlets You could do that if you want to integrate your TV your game systems your Roku whatever it is You could you could start doing that too and you'll be surprised how many things that you already have in your house It'll integrate with and then next thing you know, it's like hey look what I can do I think that one thing that's really hard for most people is I hate to call it this but it's it's so true it's like the spouse approval factor because You know, and it's not just like the spouse if you have one it's like anyone in your house, right? You have you might have kids a friend of you know, so someone living with you whatever They're used to just flipping the switch on so You know if you automate this Then people have to get used to not doing that and that you'd be surprised how hard of a habit that is to break But one thing you can do to make it a little bit easier if you actually replace the smart switches with or the actual Switches for your lights with a smart switch then that that doesn't create that confusion because you can literally have Something on like nor without a smart switch They flip the switch up to turn the light on light doesn't come on Why well because it's automated and they cut the power to it That's bad because now there's no power going to the smart plug anymore So then the lights automated anymore So rather you can either try to get people out of the habit of doing that or you could just get these smart switches That are smart enough to know it's supposed to be on right now So it just becomes an override switch at that point if you need that so that could be something That's a little hard to get used to but I think people will enjoy the fact that It just makes your house more homely because you just you know the sun sets the lights are to go on and you know It just makes you feel more at home at least for me and I think it's awesome You in one of the things that like we in we're just gonna be here one more time This is just like any other homeland project because it becomes an addiction you have one smart plug next You know you have two hundred smart plugs and you know the wattage of every room in your house Just like Jay does And he's got their feed in his turtles I mean yes So true I do and not only that but it could you could also you know if you're not in good mood You want to be an a-hole or your kids being an a-hole and they're not listening Just just just flip the switch on their computer to get their attention like if they're not like answering It's time for dinner, right? Assistant you could just like hit the switch on their computer the computer just cuts off like well I tried calling you but I got your attention now Yes hilarious to do that because it works and they hate it so much when you do that So you know it we have teenagers so yeah, they are in the rebellious phase of their life And now we are in the tech phase where we can turn things off You know, I wonder what it's like to grow up with parents that are tech savvy I don't know what that's like personally. I am that parent, but I have to imagine that it's like oh my god I can't do anything here like they'll just cut my internet off at the minute. I I see the wrong thing Yes My my son's friends think it's weird that dad understands memes and tech jokes So they're their parents definitely do not understand a lot of it I'm alone. I'm alone among that which means those kids are able to get away with things that my son's like, yeah, dad's got that lockdown Yeah, it's like you have that ARP watch thing and P of sense and then you you tell your kid like Why are you bringing devices into the house and attaching them to Wi-Fi trying to serve at the firewall? I can see the back address coming in. I know you're doing it Fun times. Yep fun times for sure. All right, we'll be leaving links to all this I don't think we have anything else to say about homelab other than go or home assistant other than Go go get started by first couple of runs raspberry pi You know is the base level get one device and a month from now will hear back from you with about a hundred devices But it's easy to get started. Of course, it's free if we didn't mention at the beginning This is not a product that has any licensing fees or anything like that is I actually know what I didn't dig into Is it a hundred percent open source top to bottom or mostly open source? I'm pretty sure there there is a Component you can pay for it's through a company Nabucasa, which is I always might see it on my bill It's like what is that? Oh, yeah, I remember now It's five dollars a month Which if you want to keyword if you want to get outside access easily Then I do it just to support the project because I think it's cool, right? So it is open source. There are some components like that You can easily just just not do that I think probably people probably shouldn't do that unless they really know what they're doing about securing things I like to have it. It's just you know, I could see what's going on in my house I'm not home But I'll leave it up to you guys to Either support the project that way or not and like Tom said it's free So you just download it another way to support that that project is just either blue box if you want to but you don't have to Yeah, maybe you have some hardware like you said so if you don't want to even deal with the Raspberry Pi you can do that Yep, you can put on a Raspberry Pi and Odroid or just set up a virtual box If you don't have a Raspberry Pi do a virtual box VM if you have enough RAM to run it That's valid. You can do that You could I mean literally the cost the cost of entry is almost zero if you if you have some lab equipment The power with it, right? But at least for the software and the end of things running that the cost becomes literally zero for just running a VM somewhere Yeah, check their website though. They're work instructions on how to set it up or well Well written well documented. It was it's not a challenge at all to do so don't be don't be scared off by the task It's It's one two three setup type of thing just flash the image plug in a pie and get going with it And sometimes and last thing I'll mention is that sometimes some of the integrations seem complicated You look at the instructions like what like that's weird. What do they tell me to do? I get it Just do what they say like it's easy like it might seem kind of strange So layout is a little strange, but just follow the instructions in the documentation from top to bottom It's going to work. It's not going to be hard. It's all in your head. You may be your anxious or whatever trust me It's actually a lot easier than it seems From the outset. Yeah, and the same with way that you add devices to it their configuration for that They have that on a per device. They have a configuration page where they list like oh you bought this model device Here's the steps or here's the couple settings you'll need for this model device to join it. So it's nice straightforward. So, yeah All right, we'll see you guys next week leave feedback You can find the feedback link down below in the description You can find it of course at the home lab that show we love hearing from you We love getting suggestions about different things so keep the feedback coming and yes We will do soon a Q&A video where we just answer questions from the feedback form combined with some live questions and Address directly the people that will be on here and do it all in podcast form because that's one thing I will mention for those of you some people say can you do more tutorials like honest This is the podcast me and Jay both have our individual YouTube channels where you'll find the Visual versions of the demos where we explain the different things and of course easy enough to find here watching this on my channel And easy enough to find Jay's channel also linked down below and thank you everyone for joining us. Thank you