Starting to create a Home Assistant system...jargon buster required first

[MeldrewsMate]

My aim is to have a single point of contact for many sensors and switches instead of the many proprietary apps. I started by searching for a piece of kit that could 'sniff' the airwaves and obtain data from the myriad of wifi connected stuff in my house.
I was advised to try Home Assistant (HA), which I now have running on a very compact Dell computer, however I have tried watching YouTube videos and reading many tutorials on getting started with HA, finding that the more I read the more I get bombarded with new words and jargon that add to the confusion rather than clarifying; words such as MQTT, docker, Node Red, Mosqitto, API, and many others pop up regularly, and I really can't be sure whether these things are things or software, and whether they are competing products or complementary to another product.

Perhaps some kind person would respond with a glossary of common terms, a short description of their function in plain English, and maybe their equivalents from other providers, so that I can decide on a design that will function now, and be expandable in the foreseeable future.

An example of a task I imagine I want to automate that will cover other tasks as and when my imagination allows....

Obtain hot water temperature from a Sonoff TH10 switch. Obtain a forecast of likely solar radiation from t'interWeb. Obtain state of charge (SoC) of batteries from a Victron Multiplus inverter via its CerboGX interface. Combine these three pieces of data in an algorithm that decides whether to and at what time to use battery power to heat my hot water, and to what temperature, and if not from the batteries from the heat pump or the gas boiler - maybe future integration with my mobile phone calendar to determine whether I'll need hot water that day, and indeed the likely number of house occupants.
All these data are things obtained from wifi signals transmitted around the house or from t'interWeb. I will develop the algorithm, the machine must get the data.

MM

 

[endecotp]

words such as MQTT, docker, Node Red, Mosqitto, API, and many others pop up regularly, and I really can't be sure whether these things are things or software, and whether they are competing products or complementary to another product.

Perhaps some kind person would respond with a glossary of common terms, a short description of their function in plain English, and maybe their equivalents from other providers, so that I can decide on a design that will function now, and be expandable in the foreseeable future.

An example of a task I imagine I want to automate that will cover other tasks as and when my imagination allows....

Obtain hot water temperature from a Sonoff TH10 switch. Obtain a forecast of likely solar radiation from t'interWeb. Obtain state of charge (SoC) of batteries from a Victron Multiplus inverter via its CerboGX interface. Combine these three pieces of data in an algorithm that decides whether to and at what time to use battery power to heat my hot water, and to what temperature, and if not from the batteries from the heat pump or the gas boiler - maybe future integration with my mobile phone calendar to determine whether I'll need hot water that day, and indeed the likely number of house occupants.

I suspect you are well out of your depth.

Wikipedia probably has pages for most of the terms you mention.

 

[MeldrewsMate]

I suspect you are well out of your depth.

Wikipedia probably has pages for most of the terms you mention.

I certainly am out of my depth right now, but willing and able to learn. The analogy for me is like reading a short instruction on A4 paper that refers to other documents that themselves refer to other docs....by the time I've read most of them I've forgotten why I read the first sheet!!!
Try going to just about any website, read their terms and conditions and privacy policy, then try to remember why you visited their website.

So the first task is to find out what to learn about first, hence the original post.

 

[jj4091]

Download everything you read then edit the relevant parts into one document for later reference.
Qr search for sites likes this.

Wireless industry acronyms and Glossary of terms

Explore a comprehensive glossary of wireless industry acronyms and terms, demystifying complex abbreviations and technologies in the telecoms sector.

www.ranplanwireless.com

 

[pcaouolte]

I would advise that you start small. Do not try to get everything working with HA (Home Assistant) at once. Pick things that are currently controlled by one proprietary app and try to get HA to control those things. You do not lose access from the proprietary app when you add things to HA, you can use either HA or the proprietary app to control each gadget going forward.

MQTT is a little piece of software running alongside HA. Gadgets can send data to MQTT which passes that data to HA. When HA wants to change the status of a gadget it can send an instruction to MQTT which sends it on to the gadget. Not all gadgets communicate through MQTT, you may have no gadgets that use it, in which case you won't need it.

Ignore docker and Node Red, you don't need them to get started and probably will never need them.

API is Application Programming Interface. You don't need to know anything about those because some clever people will have written software which allows HA to communicate with your gadgets and will present sensors and switches inside the HA software that you can use to control your gadget.

The first gadget in your imagined setup is a Sonoff TH10 switch. You need something in HA which gives you an indication of the state of that gadget and ability to control it from HA. Just start with this part of the project and ignore the rest of your wishes for now. How do we get HA to talk to Sonoff gadgets? I don't have any of those so, in HA I went to Settings - Integrations - Add Integration - search for Sonoff. Nothing found. So my next port of call was HACS (the Home Assistant Community Store, its a place where people can provide you with free bits of software that allow HA to talk to your gadgets), you might need to install this, find instructions online. When you have installed HACS you can search it for Sonoff and you will find something called SonoffLAN which is the thing that interfaces between HA and Sonoff gadgets. Install that and it should find all Sonoff gadgets on your network and set up sensors and controls for them in HA. Check that you can control the Sonoff TH10 from HA before moving on to the next part of your imagined setup.

HA is very steep learning curve, you need to keep the steps simple and add a little at a time over weeks or months, don't imagine that you can spend an hour and get it to control every gadget in your house, it takes time and effort to set up and also needs maintenance as things will stop working periodically due to factors outside your control.

 

[ericmark]

I use google home, it seems like home assistance I can export control from the dedicated app, to google home, so I can have a mixture of makes all controlled by the same device, however it can and does go wrong every so often, having outside lights on in error is not that big of an issue, having the central heating running is, so one has to consider do you want to give control to a speech activated device?

Second is not so sure I want TRV and Wall thermostat set the same?

I do not want to run central heating unless really required, but if it is running then I want to ensure the TRVs are open, so setting a wall thermostat to 18.5°C but the TRV head set to 22°C in the same room.

There may be a way to set the TRV heads always higher to the wall thermostat, but one works out if required manually, not vie any app.

 

[drives]

Home assistant is brilliant. Don't worry too much about different terms and getting your head around everything at this stage would be my advice, and start off small as suggested above. Personally, I never really bothered with YouTube videos.

I started with one simple automation and went from there (a smart plug attached to the tumble drier and a phone notification when it finished). Now I have loads of stuff set up, including our ASHP now fully integrated, house alarm, sensors, etc.

I run almost everything through AI now—I was using Gemini for the bulk of it, but Claude is amazing for anything HA-related. Realising I could get AI to just write the code was the breakthrough for me (see below).

I'd recommend subscribing to Nabu Casa- you'll need a solution to access HA remotely anyway.

When it comes to integrating smart tech, there are two main routes:

• Official integrations: A lot of companies (like Google) have built-in support now, which you can find under Settings-Devices & Services.
• HACS (Home Assistant Community Store): This is where you get unofficial integrations and custom dashboard cards.

Essentially, once your smart tech is connected, it will expose its entities to Home Assistant. For example, our ASHP exposes over 200 entities, such as current outlet flow temp, DHW tank set temp, etc.

Again, AI can talk you through setting up HACS and how to integrate whatever smart tech you have step-by-step if needed. That said, it looks as though HA is changing soon so that HACS will be built in. The most complex integration I've done was for my Google cameras, and there's no way I could have figured it out without AI taking me through each bit I needed to do.

Custom dashboard cards are where you will get what you need to set up the more complex and aesthetically pleasing dashboards.

For building automations or dashboards, you can use the visual editor or go straight to the code editor. My main advice would be: just tell an AI model what you want and give it the relevant entity names- then use code editor and copy and paste the code it gives you- it will provide it in the right format for HA. I frequently use screenshots to show the LLM what the code generated so it can spot errors, adjust formatting, or tweak dashboard aesthetics and alignment.

As for other things such as helpers, I mainly use these to collate statistics so this will be for ASHP COP monitoring and that sort of thing.