Creating user
As we are creating the new Smart Home, click the main button.
In this page, we have to create a new user. I called mine MeaVerba, but it will be more convenient If you use a true name, because optionally you can tie this user with his devices and create notifications or automations for him.
Locating house
Next window asks you for location of your house which Home Assistant can use for weather forecasts, sensing your presence, sun-based automations like „When the sun goes down, close the window blinds, switch on Christmas lights“ and so on. After you set your house location, click Next.
Sharing Data
This is the last window for setting things. Here you can choose, which data you want to share with development team to help them make Home Assistant even better.
Discovered devices
The last page of the onboarding wizard is dedicated to the list of devices that your Home Assistant has already discovered. Little scary, right? But it’s very convenient and user-friendly. If you are not seeing there everything don’t worry, you can add them later. Select Finish and you can finally see your Home Assistant dashboard.
Where to now?
From here the fun part begins. Now everything depends on your motivation, why you even installed HA. I started mine to metering my energy consumption: As everything is very user-friendly it didn’t take me long to start automating my lights, fans, window blinds, to make my washer and dryer notify me about their work.
If you haven’t already bought any Smart Home devices, now is the good time to buy some. Your initial shopping list should contain:
- Smart plugs,
- Smart relays,
- Smart power meters,
- Temperature and humidity sensors,
- PIR and presence sensors.
Although i‘s easier to start with those, that communicate via WiFi, I personally prefer Zigbee ones. Because I like, that they don’t communicate to internet. On the other hand you have to buy Zigbee gateway, which is USB device of flash drive size which you have to connect into the device which runs your HA. I recommend buying Home Assistant SkyConnect (https://www.home-assistant.io/skyconnect/) from HA developers.