A Quick Overview of Home Assistant
So you’ve installed Home Assistant, now what? This software may be a little confusing at first, but with a little practice it can become very comfortable. Take your time as you learn the different parts of Home Assistant. The more comfortable your are, the more you will be able to accomplish. Here you can learn how to use the different settings tabs found in Home Assistant.
Overview
The Overview tab is your main homepage or dashboard. This is where you will control most of your devices. The dashboard’s user interface is called Lovelace UI and it is super customizable. By default, it will be maintained automatically by Home Assistant. However, you can take control of it and personalize it to your heart’s content. A fresh install shows the weather, the user, the sun sensor, and the update sensor. The sun sensor shows whether the sun is up or down and the update sensor shows whether there is an update available for Home Assistant
Map
Home Assistant can be configured to track people, items, and cars; depending on your needs. The whole system can be personalized based on what you want to set up.
Logbook
The logbook keeps a record of all of the state changes that happen to your devices as they happen, with the most recent change listed first. Some examples of state changes are a light turning from off to on, a door changing from closed to open, or the sun setting.
History
The History tab shows the states of your entities along a timeline.
Media Browser
After adding them to your system, media players, streaming services, streaming devices, and media can be controlled from this tab.
Developer Tools
The Developer Tools tab has 4 subsections. Many of these tabs will make more sense as you get better acquainted with Home Assistant.
- States – You can see each of your entities, their current states, and the entities’ attributes here.
- Services – Here, you can call any Home Assistant service by first selecting the service, then the entity.
- Template – This provides a template editor to practice JSON. JSON is used for more advanced Home Assistant configurations.
- Events – This page can be used to capture events for testing. An example would be testing if a ZigBee device is firing an event that you can use as a trigger. Events Documentation.
Supervisor
The Supervisor tab has 4 subsections.
- Dashboard – The Dashboard is where you will control your add-ons. Add-ons expand the usefulness of your Home Assistant instance by installing extra applications. It is also where you can initiate updates, when they are available.
- Add-on Store – The add-on store is where you can find Home Assistant add-ons. Add-ons give you more functionality. Some can be found in the default store, while some will have to be navigated to.
- Snapshots – Snapshots are backups of Home Assistant. You can create full or partial snapshots here.
- System – This is where you will find system information as well as a system log. This log is for the system running Home Assistant. Not to be confused with the log for Home Assistant itself.
Configuration
The Configuration tab is used to configure your components. Not everything can be configured this way, though. Because Home Assistant has so many integrations, there are a few different types of configurations. Some can be done here, from the front end. Others will need to be configured using YAML files.
Notifications
The Notifications tab is easiest of them all. This is where you will find your notifications.
Profile
The Profile tab is unique to each user you have set up. It has basic options, like language settings, light mode, dark mode, as well as some more advanced settings.
Conclusion
Take some time to learn your way around Home Assistant. Take your time as you start adding devices.
