Home Assistant interface, operation and notification

After the first start,all integrated devices areautomatically displayed in the home dashboard.

Home Dashboard: Overview

The dashboards can of course be created and customized by yourself.

the display modules are called "Cards" in Home Assistant:

In addition to the standard menu items, additional menu items appear for certain integrations. Furthermore, additional dashboards can be created and made available in the menu.

Energy dashboard

For the display of electricity or water consumption can be visualized very easily via the energy dashboard. Those who own a PV system or a balcony power plant can also display its production and surplus:

To set it up, it is enough to add the corresponding consumption meters in the energy dashboard:

Electricity grid, solar panels, battery storage, gas consumption, water consumption, or other individual devices ...

Settings

Developer tools

History

In the history, the historical data of the individual devices is automatically prepared:

The default history settings are 10 days, after which historical values are deleted from the database:

Setting: purge_keep_days integer (optional, default: 10) in the configuration.yaml file:

recorder:
  purge_keep_days: 10

See, www.home-assistant.io/integrations/recorder/, or to use a database other than SQLite: Home Assistant database MySQL vs. SQLite and to connect to an InfluxDB, see: InfluxDB: Time series database - Docker and for visualizing: Grafana: Docker - Visualize data and define alarms.

HACS: Must-have frontend packages.

For HACS integration, see: HomeAssistant Integrations.

Add resources - RGB Light Card

If you have RGB lights in use, you can use the RGB Light Card to change the colors:

apexcharts-card

Besides the RGB Light Card, I also installed apexcharts-card. This package can be used to create much more appealing graph cards:

Plotly Graph Card

If you are looking for a zoom and scroll function for charts, you should have a look at Plotly Graph Card:

lovelance-card-mod

With "lovelance-card-mod" elements in Home Assistant can be customized via CCS styles:

See: github.com/thomasloven/lovelace-card-mod

lovelance-layout-card

The "layout-card" extension allows you to customize the areas in the dashboards, depending on the screen resolution if needed. As a very simple example I use two columns for a screen width larger than 600px, smaller 600px only one column:

Notification to mobile - alert

The Android app "Home Assistant" offers besides numerous cell phone sensor values in Home Assistant also a very simple way to receive notifications from Home Assistant: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.homeassistant.companion.android&hl=de_AT&gl=US.

Alternatively, the messenger Signal can be used for notifications, see: Send Signal messages via API: signal-cli-rest-api.

Those who install the Home Assistant app will notice that Home Assistant regularly announces updating the phone sensors after Home Assistant:

Refresh Sensors.

By default, a notification with "Update sensors" is displayed every 15 minutes:

The notice can be easily removed by long pressing on the notification and disabling "SensorWorker":

Deactivating the SensorWorker does not affect the notifications stored in the automations, they still remain active. To receive a notification when an event occurs, an automation can be created for this purpose by clicking on "Configuration" and "Automation":

Notification when a certain value is reached

As an example, I created a notification for monitoring the humidity:

I created a new automation for this notification in Configuration / Automation:

The notification can be tested later with "RUN ACTIONS", but first to the settings of this automation:

service: notify.mobile_app_sm_a405fn
data:
  title: Luftfeuchtigkeit Bad
  message: >-
    Luftfeuchtigkeit: {{states('sensor.bad_2')}}%
    Temperatur:{{states('sensor.bad')}}°C