You're reading from Building Smart Home Automation Solutions with Home Assistant

Product type Book

Published in Sep 2023

Publisher Packt

ISBN-13 9781801815291

Pages 356 pages

Edition 1st Edition

Languages

Concepts

IoT Development

Author (1):

Marco Carvalho

Table of Contents (19) Chapters

Preface

1. Part 1: Introduction to Home Assistant – Installation and Configuration

2. Chapter 1: Understanding Home Automation Systems

3. Chapter 2: Getting Started with Home Assistant

4. Part 2: Install, Create, and Hack Sensors and Actuators

5. Chapter 3: Hands-On Project 1 – Creating Your Own Sensor

6. Chapter 4: Hacking a Commercial Actuator to Work with Home Assistant

7. Part 3: Automations, Customizations, and Integrations Using Home Assistant

8. Chapter 5: Creating Automations Using Home Assistant

9. Chapter 6: Doing More Using Integrations and Customizations

10. Part 4: Expanding Home Assistant’s Capabilities

11. Chapter 7: Extending Home Automation Capabilities Using Add-ons

12. Chapter 8: Installing and Setting Up Home Assistant Container

13. Part 5: Learn by Doing and Future Trends

14. Chapter 9: Hands-On Project 2 – Creating an LED Strip Controller and Adding It to Home Assistant

15. Chapter 10: Hands-On Project 3 – Creating a Five-Zone Temperature Logger for Your Home

16. Chapter 11: The Road Ahead in Home Automation Technologies

17. Index

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Using extra resources to customize your dashboard

Home Assistant allows you to customize the dashboards even more, providing extra resources that can be uploaded or installed with it. In the upcoming subsections, we will explore some of these resources so that I can show you the benefits of a well-designed dashboard.

Using the Picture Elements card

The Picture Elements card is a powerful card where you can represent the floor plan of your home, using an image in the .png format, and assign the devices you have on it. This is something I discovered recently in Home Assistant, and I did not dedicate too much time to exploring it. I will provide a quick example to you using just the floor plan of my master bedroom so that you have an idea of how you can use the card.

First, you need a floor plan of your home. Then, create a drawing or image from it. I created my master bedroom floor plan using MS Visio, but you can use another of your preference. After you have a floor plan image...