Some of my Favorite Home Assistant resources!

April 12, 2018

I’m an avid user of Home Assistant for my smart home and while I produce a lot of content myself, I still spend time on the internet reading and consuming information from a lot of smarter people out there than me. I’ve been asked by quite a few people where I get new ideas for Home Automations so I thought I’d shoot out a quick little post highlighting some of my favorites out there.

The best place to get inspiration in my mind is by looking through other people’s configurations. The easiest way to find people’s most popular and relevant Github repos is to click this search link:
https://github.com/?s=topic%3Ahome-assistant-config&type=Repositories

Marc Forth is an example of a well laid out repo with really great screenshots, themes and use of HADashboard (rather than Floorplan like mine).

Dale Higgs is another great resource for some amazing Jinja work. Jinja is the templating scripting language used in Home Assistant for some really fancy stuff. This site is SOOO full of content that it’s almost intimidating to browse through BUT you can just type whatever term you are trying to use in your automation into the search at the top and I’m sure you will find multiple examples of it’s syntax in real world use.

If you are a GitHub user, be sure to STAR these great repos so that you can get updates as they add new content.

The next best spot for me to learn new stuff is YouTube. I wish I was able to produce content for this platform like some of the people I am going to list out but it’s just not my thing. (I clearly have a face for blogging).
** Update ** I started a YouTube channel. Be sure to check it out and subscribe. I will be uploading videos weekly to https://www.youtube.com/vCloudInfo.

The original trailblazer on this front was @BruhAutomation. Ben’s work early on with Home Assistant is still an excellent base of knowledge for new users to get up to speed quickly. Unfortunately (for us), I think life got in the way and his video production has dropped off a bit. But for the basics, there’s still a wealth of knowledge on his YouTube channel. I hear through the Twitterverse that Ben could be back even better soon enough…

Thankfully as Ben stepped out of the scene for a while, Dr ZZ stepped up! The quality of Dr ZZs videos are really high! If you are running Sonoff devices, you’ve probably found his channel already since he has done some amazing things with the low cost relays. From in wall switches to garage door openers, the Doc has really exploited these devices to the edges of their potential. For one you might not have heard of, check out this newly formed channel that is gaining traction at the Hook Up.

If video is not your thing, there is also the HA Podcast! This is the place you can go to hear every other week about the newest features and releases from Home Assistant while you are driving to work. You can also just say ‘Alexa, Play the Home Assistant Podcast!’

Of course, I have to mention the great community forums run by Home Assistant as well. The ‘Share My Projects’ section specifically has all the best ideas to copy into your configurations. 😉

Reddit has some pretty good Subreddits as well. The ones below are the ones I read on the regular.

https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/

Like everything Reddit, it’s usually super up to date and easy to spot the good posts.

Surprisingly there wasn’t anything on Facebook so I have just launched a new Facebook group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/HomeAssistant/) that I am trying to get off the ground. If you are on Facebook, join this additional resource that hopefully will grow to be something very useful. Be sure to post a note saying hello!

I’m sure there is more out there and if you have something that you find super helpful, be sure to drop it in the comments so we can all check it out!

Happy Automating!

–CARLO