Connect your home with Home Assistant

What Home Assistant is

Home Assistant is a free, open-source program that you install on a small computer in your home. It brings all your devices together—lights, plugs, blinds, your solar inverter—whatever their brand. It runs inside your home, not in a manufacturer’s cloud.

togedapp doesn’t replace it: it connects to it and brings the home to the whole family, with a simple app and the permissions you decide. You set it up once, and everyone else just has to use it.

What you need

Get these together before you start. The first time takes anywhere from half an hour to an afternoon, depending on what you already have.

• A computer for Home AssistantAlways on and connected to your router with a cable. The options are just below.
• Your devicesAlmost every brand has an integration. Zigbee and Thread devices also need a USB radio stick.
• An address to reach it from outsideTo use togedapp away from your home Wi‑Fi: with Home Assistant Cloud or Cloudflare Tunnel.
• togedapp, with your household createdWhoever created the household connects it. If you don’t have one yet, start with the getting started guide.

Which hardware should I choose?

Step 1Install Home Assistant

1. Install it on your hardware

   Follow the official installation guide for the hardware you chose. With a Home Assistant Green, just connect it to your router with the network cable and plug it in.

2. Open it in your browser

   With your phone or computer on your home Wi‑Fi, go to http://homeassistant.local:8123. The first time, it takes a few minutes to get ready.

3. Create your user

   It will be the home’s administrator. Write down the password carefully and keep it somewhere safe.

4. Give your home a name and location

   It asks for them when you start, and you can change them in Settings, System, General. Choose euros and the metric system. togedapp uses the location for the weather at home, and the name on the weather card.

5. Keep it up to date

   Updates appear at the very top of Settings. Install them every so often, after making a backup.

Step 2Devices and rooms

What you do here is what the family will see in the Devices tab, so it’s worth getting it right.

1. Add your devices

   In Settings, Devices & services you’ll see the ones Home Assistant found on its own. For the rest, tap “Add integration” and search for the brand.

2. Create the rooms

   In Settings, Areas, labels & zones, create one area per room: Living Room, Kitchen, Bedroom… In togedapp, each area is a room. You can also create them in the app, in Devices, ⋯, Rooms.

3. Put each device in its room

   Open each device in Home Assistant and choose its area, or do it in togedapp: tap the device’s card, the gear, and “Room.” Anything without an area shows up under “Unassigned.”

4. Give them names everyone understands

   “Living Room Lamp” is better than “Sonoff 1000a3f2.” The name in Home Assistant is the one the family will see, and you can also change it from each device’s gear.

Step 3Access from outside your home

Home Assistant lives inside your Wi‑Fi. For togedapp to work when you’re away—and for your family to use it from work, school, or the car—it needs a public address with https. There are two ways to get one:

If you choose Home Assistant Cloud

In Settings, Home Assistant Cloud, create an account or sign in, and turn on Remote Control. Your public address appears right there: copy it for step 5.

If you choose Cloudflare Tunnel

1. Put your domain on Cloudflare

   Create a free Cloudflare account and add your domain (or buy one right there).

2. Install the Cloudflared add-on

   It’s a community add-on: in the Home Assistant Add-on Store, add its repository and install it. In its configuration, enter the address you want to use as the External Hostname, for example ha.yourdomain.com, and start it.

3. Let Home Assistant trust the tunnel

   Add this to configuration.yaml and restart Home Assistant:

   http:
     use_x_forwarded_for: true
     trusted_proxies:
       - 172.30.33.0/24

Check it: turn off Wi‑Fi on your phone and open your address in Safari. If the Home Assistant sign-in screen appears, you’re all set.

Step 4Create a token

The token is a long key that lets togedapp into your Home Assistant without knowing your password. It lasts ten years and takes a minute to create:

1. Open your Home Assistant profile

   Tap your name at the very bottom of the sidebar. On a phone, open the menu first.

2. Go to the “Security” tab
3. Create the token

   Scroll down to “Long-lived access tokens” and tap “Create token.” Name it togedapp, so you’ll know later where it’s from.

4. Copy it now

   Home Assistant only shows it once. If you lose it, no problem: delete it and create another one.

Step 5Add it to togedapp

With the address and the token at hand, open togedapp on the iPhone of whoever created the household:

1. Go to the Home Assistant settings

   Home, profile icon, Smart Home, Home Assistant

2. Fill in “Connection”

   Paste the public address, with https:// and nothing after it, and the token.

3. If you like, add the local address

   Your Home Assistant’s address inside your home, like 192.168.1.50:8123. More on that just below.

4. Tap “Test Connection”

   Each address is tested separately and turns green if it responds. It’s normal for the local one to fail if you’re not on your home Wi‑Fi.

5. Tap “Save”

   Within a few seconds, the Devices tab fills up with your rooms. If it takes a while, pull down to refresh.

9:41

Home AssistantSave

Connection

https://ha.yourdomain.com

••••••••••••••••••••••••

The public URL of your Home Assistant (Cloudflare Tunnel). You can create the token in Home Assistant → Profile → Long-Lived Access Tokens.

Local Network (Optional)

192.168.1.50:8123

Your Home Assistant address on your home network. If you fill it in, the app uses it when it’s available and switches back to the public URL when you leave Wi‑Fi.

Cloudflare Access (Optional)

CF-Access-Client-Id

CF-Access-Client-Secret

Test Connection

Local network: connected

Public URL: connected

The local address

It’s optional, but highly recommended. Many routers don’t let you reach the public address from inside your home, and even when they do, going direct is faster. With the local address, togedapp uses whichever one responds at any given moment: the local one on your home Wi‑Fi and the public one when you’re out, without you having to do a thing.

• Enter the IP address and port, without http:// (the app adds it for you): 192.168.1.50:8123. homeassistant.local:8123 works too. Without a port, 80 is used, and Home Assistant usually runs on 8123.
• You can find the IP address in Home Assistant, in Settings, System, Network.
• Ask your router to always give it the same IP address (in its settings, this is usually called “DHCP reservation” or “static IP”). If it changes, the local address will stop responding.

Step 6Who sees what

Anyone new to the household can’t see anything in the home until you turn it on. That way you can decide, for example, that the kids can turn on the lamp in their room but can’t open the garage.

• When you approve someonetogedapp asks what they can see: Devices, Energy, and Automations. Then there’s a switch for each device, all off, with “Turn All On” at the top.
• Later on, person by personIn your profile, tap their name. With Devices turned on, you can hide an entire room (“Entire Room”) or individual devices.Home, profile icon, their name
• From a deviceTap its card and the gear: under “Member Visibility,” choose who can see it.

Garage doors and gates

A garage door or gate relay comes into Home Assistant as a switch, and togedapp would show it as a plug. Mark it as a button:

1. Open its settings

   In Devices, tap its card and then the gear.

2. Under “Type,” choose “Button”

   And an icon: Garage, Gate, Door, or Doorbell. Garage and Gate are the ones that show up in the “Doors” widget.

3. That’s it: now it takes two taps

   The first turns it orange with “Activate?”, and the second, within the next four seconds, activates it. If you don’t confirm, it goes back to how it was on its own.

• The relay has to turn itself off after a second (pulse mode, or inching). If it stays on, togedapp turns it off after five seconds and warns you with “The relay doesn’t turn off by itself.”
• togedapp doesn’t know whether the door is open or closed: it just sends the command, like the remote.
• “Doors” widget: on the Home Screen and in StandBy, with up to four garage doors and gates. In CarPlay, it appears on the widgets screen in cars with a touchscreen.
• “Door” control: for Control Center, the Lock Screen buttons, or the Action button. When your iPhone is locked, it asks for Face ID.

Automations

Automations are created in Home Assistant and used in togedapp. If your home has any, the clock button appears in Devices, at the top right. There you’ll see each one with what it does described in plain English, when it last ran and, if it runs on a schedule or with the sun, when it will run next. You can turn them on, turn them off, or run them right away with “Run Now.”

Widgets, kiosk, and tags

“Room” widget

On your iPhone Home Screen, touch and hold, add the togedapp widget, and use “Edit Widget” to choose the room. It shows the room’s temperature and lights, and turns them on and off without opening the app.

An iPad on the wall

On an iPad, Profile, Kiosk Mode turns it into a panel for the kitchen or the entryway: only the devices you choose, with no lists, expenses, or profile in sight, and a screensaver with the time and the weather. To leave Kiosk Mode, you have to sign out: that way nobody exits it by accident.

NFC tags and QR codes

In Devices, ⋯, Tags, Create, choose a room and its devices, and what happens when someone holds their iPhone near the tag (“Nothing,” “Turn On,” or “Turn On or Off”). When you save, togedapp writes it to an NFC sticker or gives you its QR code to print. Anyone in the household who taps it opens that room. Which stickers to buy and ideas for using them are in the tags guide.

If something isn’t working

Security

• The token is saved in your household’s settings, and only you and the members you’ve given some home permission can read it. Anyone without permissions doesn’t receive it.
• You can revoke it anytime by deleting it in Home Assistant (profile → Security). togedapp will stop getting in immediately.
• If you leave the household as its last member, the whole household is deleted, along with the Home Assistant settings and their token.
• The guest user’s password isn’t stored anywhere: it’s only used to open their session.

You’ll find all the details in the Privacy Policy.