Doing More Using Integrations and Customizations

This chapter will focus on customization, which involves the setup of Home Assistant dashboards. You will be able to create your own dashboards and customize how the sensors, actuators, and other device data will be presented and managed. Also, you will be able to understand and change what parts of the Home Assistant dashboard can be customizable using YAML.

We will cover the following content in this chapter:

• Adding more devices to your home using integrations
• Using dashboards in Home Assistant
• Customizing your dashboards
• Using extra resources to customize your dashboard

After reading this chapter’s content, you will understand what Home Assistant can deliver in terms of the features and functionalities related to integrations and dashboards, preparing you to explore other IoT software using add-ons in the next chapter.

Technical requirements

The technical requirements for this chapter are the same as those in Chapter 5, and the basic knowledge you will need is software configuration. Some informative videos will be provided on how to create some parts of the dashboards. All the .yaml files and code for the dashboard used in this chapter are available at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Building-Smart-Home-Automation-Solutions-with-Home-Assistant/tree/main/Chapter%2006. Check out the following video to view the Code in Action: https://bit.ly/47wuUqN

Adding more devices to your home using integrations

Before we start to play with the dashboards, you will have to add more devices to your home. The way Home Assistant allows this to be done is by using integrations. We encountered some flavors of integrations using MQTT in Chapter 2, Tasmota in Chapter 3, and TP-Link KASA Smart in Chapter 4, and now we will use some others. You can create integrations for Home Assistant, but that is out of the scope of this book. Instead, we will use the built-in integrations provided by Home Assistant. At the time of writing, there are 2,412 built-in integrations available.

The built-in integrations in Home Assistant can be divided into two main types:

• Home Assistant-based integrations
• Device manufacturer-based integrations

Home Assistant-based integrations are natively provided directly by Home Assistant. They allow you to create sensors based on other types of information available in Home Assistant, add more features to automations...

Using dashboards in Home Assistant

Using the knowledge that you have gained so far in this book, you can add devices to your Home Assistant and test them. You can also create automations, scripts, and scenes and test them. When adding devices to your home, you can manage them individually by clicking on them using the Settings | Devices & Services | Devices path. By clicking on this path, you will be able to see the device and its entities, as shown in Figure 4.9 in Chapter 4. When using this method, you must repeat it every time for each device if you want to manage its data using its entities. You should be able to access all the entities of a device you want to manage in a customized window. The good news is that you can do it using dashboards in Home Assistant.

In the next subsections, we will learn what dashboards are and how we can populate them.

Understanding and creating dashboards

Dashboards are what Home Assistant implemented to present various information from...

Customizing your dashboards

In this section, we will explore one of the most fun activities in this book, which is to customize some dashboards in Home Assistant. The dashboards will be where you will interface with your home, controlling actuators and verifying the status of the sensors, so this will need to be somewhat easy for you to access and manage. The views will be where you can see the cards and badges.

I will provide you with three main approaches to configuring your dashboards with different cards so that you can have an overview of the possibilities that can be used to interface with your home. These approaches are as follows:

• By home dependencies: The by home dependencies dashboard approach will group devices and entities based on the dependencies of my home. Currently, I have eight dependencies with devices installed, so we will explore different cards that can better be reshown by this configuration.
• By device type: The by device type dashboard approach...

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...

Summary

In this chapter, we learned how we can do more using integrations and dashboard customizations. We saw how I can configure the remaining devices in my home using distinct types of integrations for sensors and actuators that I have at home. Different setups and configurations were demonstrated so that you can understand the integration process used by Home Assistant.

After we installed and configured more devices to work with Home Assistant, we learned about the dashboard and views configuration, enabling us to represent the information we have for the devices in diverse ways, which can be managed according to our needs. We did that by providing examples of using badges and three approaches to configuring dashboards in incremental steps using cards. We finished the chapter by providing extra resources that can help you to further customize your dashboard using cards and themes developed by the Home Assistant Developer community.

The next chapter will take you to another...