Step 3: Using

This isn’t so much of a step as it is an overview of the core interface that will be used for the rest of this guide.

Home Assistant has several sections or ‘panels’ visible to you depending on the type of account you are logged in with.

The first account that was created in Step 2 was an Administrator account which means you have access to everything. This is good and bad!

Great that you can tweak and play around with it all, but bad because you can break things. Thankfully, if you chose the same option of Home Assistant, a deletion of the database and restart usually gets you back up and running.

The initial panels available to you are:

  • Overview – the main front end user interface for operating and monitoring your home automation
  • Map – a view of device trackers and locations
  • Logbook – a diary of events and state changes
  • History – a series of bar and chart graphs
  • Developer Tools – behind the scenes tweaking
  • Supervisor – installation and host manager
  • Configuration – where you setup all the smart devices and entities along with scenes and automations
  • Notifications – user messages
  • User Profile – user account details and options

The Supervisor allows you to extend the functionality of Home Assistant with Add-Ons such as the Configurator to edit the YAML files directly.

Next: Step 4: Looks via Footstep 1: YAML