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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18. Other Books You May Enjoy

Testing and debugging your automation

In the process of creating an automation, many times you will create it and want to test it right away to verify it is working. In other situations, even if you can test the automation immediately, for some reason it won’t work and you will want to know what to fix. Home Assistant provides Developer Tools, which can help you to test and debug your automations. We will explore Developer Tools in the next subsections.

Setting and checking the state of entities

While I’m writing this subsection in my office, I want to test automation 1. One way to do that is to go to my garage, trigger the motion sensor, and see whether the garage lights turn on. Another option is to set the state of the motion sensor entity and check the state of the garage light entity. We can do this by using the STATES tab using the Developer Tools in Home Assistant.

Let’s test our automation 1 by setting and checking the state of the entities. We...