[00:03] something that you'll never hear me say. I've dug through the hundreds or even thousands of add-ons for Home Assistant and found my 10 favorite. These are so fun and useful. Of course, they're all free and open source, so you could get
[00:17] all 10 and it won't cost you a cent. Shout out to the open source community. All right, let's get into it. So, for this first one, I heard about it a couple of months ago when I was at CES at the Home Assistant meetup. If you've
[00:29] much fun. And they were talking about Flight Radar 24. And it really caught my attention because my wife, Ali, loves seeing what flights are overhead. And so, I was like, I got to add this to my smart home. And it works extremely well.
[00:45] You can add to your dashboard a map of all the flights overhead, as well as a list of what those flights are and where they're headed. And you can run automations based on certain flights, which I haven't really got into, but I
[00:59] love the dash board part of it. And it was really easy to set up. There is no subscription or anything like that, but I had to make a few little tweaks. One I had to make a few little tweaks. One is the radius from 1,000 to 5,000 m.
[01:12] 1,000 was like directly over my house versus 5,000 is still like you can view the flights and you'll be able to see more on the dashboard. And then, when dashboard, you have to make sure to add
[01:25] the latitude and longitude in the little URL string. If you forget to do that, it just won't show up right. The last thing you'll need to do is make sure you add an exception in the recorder to not fill up your Home Assistant database with
[01:38] tons of just unnecessary data from all the different flights. But yeah, I love this add-on. When we're hanging out in the backyard, I can open up my outdoor dashboard, see what flights are overhead, tell the kids, "Whoa! Kids,
[01:51] that plane is coming from Cabo." "Boring." "Dad, you're nerd." Ali is using it. She really likes it. And I don't know if it's a global high spouse approval factor, but definitely a very high Ali approval factor. All right, for
[02:07] this next one, it solves a really big pain point that people have with the Home Assistant automations. So, if you want to use a flow editor, you know, where you can visualize the flow of an automation, like connect the dots and
[02:20] all of that, you typically have to use something like Homey or Node-RED. Now, obviously, Homey is a whole different platform. And Node-RED is a whole different system. It doesn't use the Home Assistant automations. You know,
[02:33] people love Node-RED, but I haven't used it for that reason. Well, this third option solves all of that because you can use existing Home Assistant can use existing Home Assistant automations and add a flow editor on top
[02:47] of it. So, you can modify existing automations like this one. It is a simple one. It has a condition when you turn on a light from a motion sensor. But say you want to add another condition, you know, at a different
[03:01] time, change the light to a different setting. Well, if you were using the normal Home Assistant automations, you would have to add another condition. And some people, but if you were using Cafe, all you have to do is drag another line
[03:15] from that condition for another action, and magically, the automation is updated with the correct logic. This makes it so easy to visualize and see exactly what's
[03:27] happening. Pretty sweet add-on. All right, the easiest and fastest way to give your entire smart home a facelift is by adding a theme. And there are some crazy themes out there, like ones that you can just make it look like the Star
[03:41] Trek dashboard or something like that. But I like one, it's called the Frosted Glass theme. And it kind of looks similar to the iOS liquid glass, but a
[03:53] lot better than that. I mean, they kind of botched that. It has this nice like reflection and tint on all the things on the dashboard. They give you also a theme manager to slightly modify it if you want to swap out the background
[04:07] image and change the accent color. So, that's what I did. I'm using the exact same background image, but I darkened it slightly and then re-uploaded it. And to little more contrasty. I think it looks incredible. And of course, there's a
[04:22] light and a dark theme. I'm dark mode all the way. And there's also a full version and a light version. Now, full version might work completely fine for version might work completely fine for you, but I noticed on like my iPad, it
[04:35] was giving me some issues. It's trying to change all the pop-ups and all of rendering, a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes to make that happen. So, I prefer the light version, even though it doesn't change the pop-ups, it
[04:49] issues with my devices. So, yeah. There's a lot of cool themes out there, but this one's my favorite. Okay, this next one slightly pains me a bit because I made a video about a year ago where I made essentially my own remote for my
[05:06] Apple TV using a dashboard in Home Assistant. Some of the comments were like, "Why didn't you use Fire remote?" And I was like, "What is that?" Looked it up. Oh, yeah. It does basically the same thing that I made, and this would
[05:19] have saved me so much time. So, yeah, kind of kicking myself for not using this in the first place. So, if you use something like an Apple TV, Google TV, Fire Stick, Nvidia Shield, they'll have a remote for that. I added it for the
[05:34] remote in my family room, and I increased the scale to full size, which ends up being almost the same as the full Apple TV remote. So, I have the same muscle memory while using it on my phone. And it works extremely well. So,
[05:49] if you're looking for an alternative way to control your TV with your phone, this is a great option. So, I love all the add-ons on this list, but this next one might take the cake is my all-time favorite. It's called Bubble Card, and
[06:03] I've been using it for a while now, and it's made my life so much easier because I can hide things on my dashboard that I don't need to see right away, but I can access them quickly. You can normally create a sub view in a dashboard, and
[06:18] you can go to that and then jump back to your main dashboard, and that works perfectly fine. But the Bubble Card is so much faster. It pops up instantly, can just click off to the side and it goes away. So, it's fast and
[06:32] user-friendly. You could use this for all sorts of stuff. For example, that flight tracker that I showed earlier. That takes up a big chunk of the dashboard, but if you want to have quick access to that, you could add a button
[06:45] and you can see all the flights and then just click away when you're done with of stuff, even some things that I'll show later in this video. If you have announcements or talk to you throughout the day, you definitely need this next
[07:00] add-on, and it's called Chime TTS. And what it does is play a little announcement notification noise before your smart home starts talking to you. >> [bell] >> You have calendar events today, and I am
[07:14] putting them on the dashboard now. Because it can be a little jarring if you're talking to a family member, then all of a sudden, ah! My smart home is interrupting. >> Hey, were you talking to me? Well, I
[07:27] recorded your conversation anyway. So, what this does is play a little >> [music] >> I need to take a pause from listening to TV or whatever." So, yeah, it's way better. And what's cool about Chime TTS
[07:41] is that you can use some of the built-in notification sounds or you can upload your own custom MP3 sound. I'm just using the default one that's labeled as soft. I think it sounds just fine, but it is cool that you can customize it. I
[07:56] did run into one issue. When I tried to use it with Piper, it didn't work. And Piper just runs locally in my smart home, so I prefer that over something working with it. So, what I ended up doing is just use Chime TTS to play the
[08:11] sound and then use Piper right after it, and it works just fine. So, if you're running into that issue, then I would just try that. But yeah, it's been announcements, and it definitely makes
[08:25] life a lot better. Like I said earlier, there are tons of Home Assistant add-ons, and some of them feel a bit unnecessary. And that's how I felt about this next one until I tried it. It's called Team Tracker, and what it does is
[08:39] it pulls in your favorite sports team into your smart home. I was like, "Yes, that's cool." But then I saw it has a dashboard card that looks extremely nice and completely changed how I view this add-on. So, anytime that there's a game,
[08:56] I have the dashboard card appear on my dashboard in the kitchen or on my phone. And so, I'm like, "Oh, yeah, there's a game on tonight. Might want to watch that." It gives me the countdown of when it's about to start. And once the game
[09:09] right there, as well as some stats that's happening during the game. So, our smart home dashboard because I get so much info without annoying notifications. All right, this next one has such high spouse approval factor,
[09:24] it's the only reason I'm allowed to have a Home Assistant dashboard in our kitchen, and that's Atomic Calendar Revive. The default calendar dashboard in Home Assistant, it's garbage. It's not that good. But, you know, you can
[09:39] pull in Google Calendar into Home Assistant, so I have my family's Google Calendar. And using Atomic Calendar Revive, it displays the info so well. You can customize it exactly to how you like it. So, I can see all the upcoming
[09:54] events. And when one event is actually happening at that time, there's a little progress bar that appears and it shows you how much longer till it's done. And then once the event is over, it disappears. So, it works so well. It's
[10:07] easy to read. If you haven't added it already and you have a busy family, I definitely recommend it. So, I've been getting really into music assistant lately on Home Assistant, but there's not really a good media player on the
[10:20] dashboard to handle all the music assistant functionality. Like yeah, you you want to view the queue, be able to turn devices on and off, you need music assistant player card. You can customize it to have certain buttons or not and it
[10:37] works very, very well. You can see the queue of the next songs that are going to be playing on that player. The versatility on this one is extremely high. The only issue I have with it is that it's kind of tall. So, on one of my
[10:51] dashboards here in the studio, it's a little too tall. I had to have to scroll phone. But yeah, it comes in two different add-ons. If you're not seeing the album artwork or the queue, make sure you add the add-on music assistant
[11:07] with the bubble card that I showed earlier. If I need to make changes to my music, I press a button, the media player card pops up, I make the adjustments to the music that I need to, click away, and yeah, it works amazing.
[11:21] And I have some really cool things to show with music assistant soon. So, make miss it. All right, for this last add-on, there are dashboard cards. going to go over them quickly and I think that they're all must-haves. The
[11:35] first one is mushroom cards and it might seem unnecessary since tons of these things are added in the default Home Assistant dashboard now, but there are still some missing ones like a drop-down selector. So, if you want some of those
[11:49] as well as some other really useful dashboard cards, definitely get the mushroom cards to add that extra functionality. The next one is card mod and this is how you change the style for a specific card. Now, if you want to
[12:02] change the style for all the cards, you would just use a theme. But say you want to change something like on my kitchen dashboard, I show the temperature outside and I want that to be a different size and color than everything
[12:15] else on my dashboard. Well, I'd use the card mod and add a little bit of styling code to it and there you go. You can change it to be big and yellow and easy to read. Another really cool one is time bar card. So, if you're using any timers
[12:30] in your smart home, you can visualize it really well with a progress bar and I'm using this in our garage. We have a timer that turns off the lights if motion hasn't seen anybody in 10 minutes since we have multiple motion sensors
[12:43] and doors that open and close. It's just easier for me to have a timer kick off lights. So, I'm visualizing that with time bar card and I think it looks great. If you're big into weather, then you'll really like weather radar card.
[12:56] It'll show you the clouds and the weather in your area. So, I put that on our outdoor dashboard as well that's on the flight tracker. And yeah, we don't get a whole lot of rain here in Arizona, but when we do, it's fun to see it on
[13:08] the radar. And the last one is kiosk mode. It's been around forever, but sometimes I forget to use it and it's really easy to do once you add the add-on. If you're using fully kiosk browser, you have to put in a start URL
[13:22] and all you have to do is add a question mark and then kiosk. Once you do that, your dashboard will make the header and sidebar disappear, make it look cleaner, more room for the dashboard. So, yeah, don't forget about kiosk mode. Can I
[13:37] just say that Home Assistant is one of the greatest things ever made? I look at these other smart home platforms, they might get a few tiny little updates once a year, whereas thanks to the open source community, we're getting so many
[13:51] updates and you can just press a button and get these cool add-ons that I showed much fun adding them to my own smart home and I hope you guys have fun too smart home to the way you like it. Thanks for watching.
[14:07] Dad, can we keep her? Can we keep her? >> Oh, one second. Um yes. Yay! Thank you. Wait, what? It's probably not that big of a deal.
[14:20] >> Thanks, Dad, for letting us keep her. When did I say yes to this? Dad, can we keep her? Can we keep her? >> Yes.