Episode: 4099
Title: HPR4099: Introducing Home Automation and Home Assistant
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4099/hpr4099.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 19:36:26

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This is Hacker Public Radio episode 4,099 for Thursday the 18th of April 2024.
Today's show is entitled, Introducing Home Automation and Home Assistant.
It is hosted by Ken Fallon and is about 15 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, a new series about all things home automation, this time introduction
to home assistant.
Today's show is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share alike
license.
Hi everybody, my name is Ken Fallon and you're listening to another episode of Hacker Public
Radio.
Today's episode is an introduction to a new series here in HPR called Home Automation
or The Internet of Things.
This is the first episode in the series and I encourage everybody to contribute if you
can.
First of all, let's talk about what home automation is and for that we'll go to the Home Automation
page on Wikipedia and it says, Home Automation or DUM ATTICS is a building automation for
the home.
A home automation system will monitor and or control home attributes such as lighting,
climate, entertainment systems and appliances.
It may also include home security such as access control and alarm systems.
The phrase home smart home refers to home automation devices that have Internet access.
Home automation abroad or categorically includes any devices that can be monitored or controlled
via wireless radio signals, not just having Internet access.
Unconnected to the Internet, home sensors and activation devices are important constitutes
of the Internet of Things IOT.
A home automation system typically connects control devices to a central smart home hub
sometimes called a gateway.
The user interface for the control of the system uses either wall mounted terminals, tablets
or desktop computers, a mobile phone application or a web interface that may be accessible
off-site through the Internet.
So that is home automation and a lot of that I have some issues with.
For example, the information requiring Internet access and that has been justified in the
years that I have been looking into this topic.
So I started looking into it some years ago and actually got quite frustrated by the
amount of configuration that was needed when I am trying to get Arduino's or ESP32's
or Raspberry Pi's connected.
It involved a lot of wiring, hacking, different firmware's, writing images etc.
But in the intervening times a lot has changed.
Not only have people become aware of the fact that smart homes and Internet of Things,
the security implications of that, a lot of the services have combust left people with
devices that no longer function at worst and at best are running out of date software.
There has been a lot of information about breaches, security breaches that have taken place
where the devices have been taken over.
Covered here on our own security and privacy series if you want to look up some of those.
But a lot of that has just changed recently and I have been encouraged by my colleagues
to get back into this whole idea of controlling an automation in your home.
Doing as simple as turning on lights, knowing what the temperature is outside and they have
cases where they do quite a lot of automations for growing plants, for monitoring their energy
consumption, solar panel utilization and all that sort of stuff.
So now is a good time to get back into it I feel and I have dipped my toe into the water
a little bit, I've ordered some devices for testing, I've got a Raspberry Pi 5 and I
got some devices here and we'll walk you through in this series the installation of it on a
Raspberry Pi and on a spare Intel-based computer that you have knocking around.
Then we'll hopefully go on to be able to do other things but that's the commitment now
three episodes.
So we see how we go.
If you're interested in taking a deep dive, I've linked to six of the smart home channels
that I've subscribed to over the past year or two in order of the ones that I have watched
the most, I'm not completely finished watching all of them, I've got some good information
out of all of them so there are some tips there.
So one of the main things that you will need when you're doing home automation is something
to act as your home your gateway and for me I'm going to use Home Assistant if you want
to contribute other episodes on other gateways then feel free to do that.
So I'll go to the Wikipedia page again and read you about Home Assistant.
It is a free, open-source software for home automation designed to be an enter, net
of things, ecosystem independent integration platform and central control system for
smart home devices with a focus on local control and privacy.
It can be accessed through a web-based user interface by a companion application for
Android or iOS or by voice commands via a supported virtual assistant such as Google Assistant
or Amazon Alexa and their own assist which is a built-in local voice assistant.
The home assistant software application is installed as a computer appliance.
After installation it will act as a central console system for the home automation, commonly
called a smart home hub that has the purpose of controlling internet of things connectivity
technology devices software applications and services from third parties via a modular
integrated components including native integration components for common wireless communication
protocols such as Bluetooth, threads, Zigbee and Z-Wave which is used to create local personal
area networks with small low-power digital radios.
Home Assistant as such supports controlling devices and services connected via either
open or proprietary ecosystems as long as they provide public access via some kind of
open API or MQTT for a third-party integration over the local area network or the internet.
Information for all devices and their attributes entities that the application can be used
control from within scripts, trigger automations usually scheduling and blueprints subroutines.
For example controlling lights, climate entertainment systems and home appliances, end quote.
Wow that was a lot.
So basically it's something you install takes over the device, you can communicate via
a web page via an app, the virtual assistance, it reads information from sensors, it can
act and stuff, it can communicate for example the motion sensor from one vendor can communicate
with it that when the motion sensor activates the return on the light using a smart plug
adapter from another provider.
And all those things called like boot to threads Zigbee and Z-Wave are communication light
weight wireless port calls that these devices use.
I'm quite a lot of devices in the markets now use Wi-Fi as well so you can connect to
the via Wi-Fi.
And there's of course nothing stopping you communicating with devices over regular old
ethernet.
So I think a Raspberry Pi connected over a ethernet cable with sensors connected to the
GPIO port, that's the sort of integration that you can do.
So that's good.
The summary, it was written by Paul Scouton and it's now currently developed by the Home Assistant
Cocoa or team and community, it was initially released in 2013, repository is on GitHub Home
Assistant, dot com forward slash Home Assistant.
It's a Python based application, although you won't see much of that.
And it is a virtual appliance, so it kind of takes over the device that you're going
to be running.
You can also run it as a Docker container etc, so we'll get into that later on.
And it's released under an Apache license, so free and open source.
And the Home Assistant URL is home-assistant.io.
I'll be covering the installation in other episodes, but I want to go through the concepts
and terminology from the Home Assistant webpage, which is released under a Creative Commons
Attribution Non-Commercial Share Like 4.0 International License Link in the Show Notes.
And there's also also images and screenshots of the thing in the show notes as well.
So I'll read this out for you here.
Integrations, so there's various different things here that we need to terminology that
we need to know about.
Home Assistant is often referred to as HA, so if you're searching, HA might be a good search
term for you.
There are such things as integrations, which are pieces of software that allow Home Assistant
to connect to other software platforms.
For example, a product by Philips called Hue would use the Hue Philips Hue integration
and allow Home Assistant to talk to the hardware controller Hue Bridge.
Any Home Assistant compatible devices connected to the Hue Bridge would appear in Home Assistant
as a device.
And there's links to a full list of compatible integrations and integration documents.
Once an integration has been added, the hardware and our data are represented in the Home Assistant
as devices and entities.
So an entity are basic building blocks that hold data on the Home Assistant.
An entity represents a sensor, an actor or a function in Home Assistant.
Entities are used to monitor physical properties or to control other entities.
An entity is usually part of a device or a service and entities as states.
That's not worrying too much about all of this for now, but these are terms that we're
going to be touching on later and if needed we can dive in deeper.
So let's talk about devices now.
There are logical groupings of one of more entities.
A device may represent a physical device, which can have one or more sensors.
A sensor appears as entities associated with a device.
For example, a motion sensor is represented as a device.
It may provide motion detection, temperature and light levels as entities.
Entities have states such as detected when motion is detected or clear when there is
no motion.
Devices and entities are used throughout Home Assistant.
To name a few examples you have a dashboard which can show the state for an entity, for
example, the license on or itself.
In an automation that can trigger a state of an entity, for example, a motion center
to text motion and triggers a light to turn on.
It can also be a preferred color or brightness which you would save in a scene.
So areas and area in Home Assistant is a logical grouping of devices and identities that are
meant to match areas or rooms.
In the physical world, your home, for example, the living room, area group, devices and
entities that are in your living room.
Areas allow you to target service calls at an entire group of devices, for example, turning
off all the lights in the living room.
Locations within your home such as living room, dance floor, etc.
Areas can be assigned to floors.
Areas can be used to automatically generate cards such as an area card.
And then we move on to automations.
This is the most interesting one for me.
A set of repeatable actions that can be set up to run automatically.
Automations are made of three key components, a trigger, which is an event that starts
the automation.
For example, when the sun sets or a motion sensor is activated.
Number two is a condition.
Conditional tests that must be met before the action is run, for example, is somebody
home.
Action number three is an action itself.
Interaction with the devices such as turning on the lights.
So to learn about basic automations, you can refer to the automation basic page or
try creation and automation yourself.
And then we have scripts.
Now they're similar to automations scripts are repeatable actions that can be run.
The difference between scripts and automations is that scripts do not have triggers.
This means that a script cannot automatically run unless they are used in automations.
Suscripts are particularly useful if you want to perform some action in different automations
or trigger them in the dashboard for information on how to create scripts, see the documentation
only two more to go.
Next one is scenes.
Scenes allow you to predefined settings for your device, similar to driving mode on
your phone or driver profile in cars.
It can change the environment to suit you.
For example, you're watching the film scene, may dim the lights and switch on the TV and
increase its volume.
This can be saved as a scene and used without having to set individual devices every time.
And the scene documentation will give you more information on that.
Then we have add-ons.
So depending on your installation type, you can install third-party add-ons, which are
usually apps that you can run in Home Assistant that can run with Home Assistant, but provide
a quick and easy way to install, configure and run within Home Assistant.
Customs provide additional functionality whereas integrations connect Home Assistant
to other apps.
So that is the start of the series and hopefully there will be more episodes soon.
And as I said before, if you want to follow along, please do so.
And if you have been involved in smart homes are some of the issues around or associated
with this series, get in touch, record a series yourself.
Record an episode yourself and with that I'll ask you to tune in tomorrow for another
exciting episode of Hacker Public Radio.
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