What
Basic concepts of home automation
A few things you should get used to before starting to dig deep in home automation are the following basic concepts:
entities: are the building blocks of your smart home automation system and most of the time represent a sensor to monitor physical properties or an actor/function of the system. They have one or more statuses the will be used to do “things”;
devices: usually you’ll see them a real physical devices grouping one or more entities. An example could be a motion sensor that provides motion detection, temperature, and light levels as entities;
integrations: are pieces of software that allow the home automation system to connect to other software and platforms (cloud included) so that devices connected to the external platform can appear inside your home system;
automations: sets of repeatable actions set up to run automatically at specific times and/or triggered by state change of one or more entities;
scenes: allow you to create predefined settings for your devices so that they change an environment to suit you. For example, your watching films scene
may dim the lighting, switch on the TV and increase its volume.