Introduction

 What is the "Blue Collar Home Assistant?

I'm not new to the world of technology, having worked for a living in some aspect of technology since 1980. (I cut my teeth on a TRS-80.) I even had an extensive X-10 setup in my home back in the early-90's, but that faded away over time (and several moves & a couple of marriages).

Enter today's home automation technology and the product "Home Assistant (HA)."

Before I stumbled on to HA, like many others out there, I had automation products from many different vendors that wouldn't talk to each other unless something like Amazon Echo, Google Home, or Apple HomeKit was used. But I didn't really find myself totally enamored with those products because loss of an internet connection meant loss of operations. Plus, they didn't offer a huge range of integrations and add-ons that I didn't even know existed until I installed HA. Things like being able to monitor the health of my NAS, for example. HA certainly helped bring my disparate technologies together!

But why "blue collar?"

Simply put - if you're not a programmer, or you don't have a programmer's mind, HA might be super frustrating for you. I found that out the hard way. I went into this not seeking to find people to do my work for me, but I DID want to learn. And if you want to really unlock to potential of HA, you need to be comfortable programming in YAML, using Jinja, and to be really slick, it helps to have some CSS knowledge as well.

That's not necessarily me. I'm InfoSec by trade these days, and any thoughts of doing programming has long since passed me by. I haven't done serious programming since the days of BASIC and FORTRAN. (Dating myself, right?) So to do some of what I was looking for, I either needed to read documentation that was sometimes rather lacking or out of date (as it can be in the open source world), or depend on folks to lend a helping hand at times.

While searching for help, I found a number of folks who were more than willing to give me a hand with some troubles that showed up. There were, however, several who scoffed at being burdened by helping the new and unwashed get up to speed and figure out how to do things with HA. I suppose they just picked it up by doing it or through osmosis, and perhaps they didn't see why others couldn't do that too. Here's a news-flash though:

Not everyone is cut from the same cloth.

Sometimes we all need a little help.

This won't be a super busy blog (at least I don't think it will be), and it's not meant to be an "ask me anything and I'll fix it for you" kind of repository. Instead, I intend to post some things about HA I've learned along the way from the school of hard-knocks. 

If you need general help about HA, there are many YouTube videos out there that can help too, so don't overlook that option. And AI - I actually learned a lot from ChatGPT while working on a project, and honest to goodness, that was one of the most patient and understanding mentors I've ever had. Go figure.

There's a Home Assistant Discord channel. It's flooded with information, but it can be difficult to find help in there at times. At least that's been my experience. While I have received some help in there, I've also seen (and been the recipient of) some of the snarky responses if you ask for assistance and it's something that was discussed x number of weeks or months ago. Or if you don't provide all of the necessary information right off the bat with your first request.

There's also the Home Assistant Community on the web. Again, tons of information out there, ripe for the searching. And in my experience, a bit more accommodating to the newer user.

Over here at The Blue Collar Home Assistant, I'll post what I've found to work and not work, some of my failures, and some of my wins. Maybe it will help someone. Maybe it will help nobody. But if I can help one of you find more success with HA, then I'll have done my job I suppose.

Rock on.