in a recent video i showed you how to cast your lovelace dashboards
over to supported google devices but with the release of update 2022.3 it's now become
even easier so let's jump straight into it and find out just how easy this now is check it out
what's going on guys i hope you're all doing well update 2022.3 brought us a ton of new features
and one of those new features was the new action type play media this action allows you to quickly
and easily set up new automations all whilst using the graphical user interface so it's
all done through a series of clicks and there's no coding or yaml required it's very intuitive
and very user-friendly and it's this new feature that makes it even easier to cast our dashboards
let's have a look at how to use this action type then from within our automation
so from our configuration menu we're going to want to select automations from here we're going to
choose to create a new automation so in the bottom right we're going to select create automation
and from here we're going to select start with an empty automation in our new automation if we just
scroll down you'll see that we've got the trigger the condition and the action and it's the action
that's going to have this new action type so in the action type box we're going to select that
and we're going to choose the play media option when you select that you'll see a new selector
appear which is going to allow you to choose one of your media devices depending on the media
player you choose will determine what sources you're allowed to use for that particular player
in our case we're going to be casting a dashboard and i know that my office display
which is a google nest hub is capable of doing the cast feature so i'm just going to select that
with your media player chosen you'll have a new option for picking media
and if you select that you'll be given a choice of different options that are available to actually
play on that device the one that we're interested in is this lovelace one so if we select that it's
going to show us all of the dashboards that we currently have on this particular instance i've
got three different dashboards i just have the default one and then two others if i was to select
my home dashboard here you'll see it will show me all of the different views that are available in
that dashboard so you can see that i've got a few different ones here so if i wanted to cast
the kitchen view i could or if i wanted to cast the individual lights view i could also do that
so decide on the view that you want to cast and then just select it and with that selected you'll
just see it appear within the action so what this is now going to do is it's going to cast
this lights dashboard over to our selected media player and as i said i know that my office display
is capable of supporting the cast feature but if you were to use a media player that doesn't
support it then you wouldn't see the dashboard option so if we just clear this and i select a
different media player that i know is not capable of it so if i choose one of my amazon echoes here
and this particular one i've chosen happens to be an echo show and that does have a screen but
it doesn't support the cast feature and i can see here that an information box has popped
up to tell me that the media player does not support browsing media so with this particular
one i can't actually cast any media to it and that's just a limitation of this specific device
okay let's clear this one and have a look at another example so i'm going to clear this one
and i'm going to choose one of my sonos devices so i've got my office sonos chosen here and i can see
that this one does support media but if i choose the pick media option i can see a few different
media sources but as you can see from that list the dashboard one isn't there going back to our
working example this is how you'd actually set up and use the action type within your automation
and i think you'll agree this is definitely much easier than the original version i showed you in
the previous video as well as being able to cast your lovelace dashboards there are a few other
sources that you're able to cast to devices one of the ones that i've been making use of is local
media the process for using local media is the exact same you'll need to select a media player
that supports casting then when you select your media type you'll just choose local media once you
do that you'll have the option to select a bit of media that you might have in my example here i've
got two images and i've also got an mp3 file if i wanted to adjust these or add more i could select
manage in the top right here selecting that would give me the option to add more media which i could
upload directly through the browser or i could also delete media i didn't want from the list
so you just select one of your local bits of media and that will be the bit of media that
gets casted to display another handy feature that was added in the new update is the ability to test
individual actions which is great in our use case here where we're testing out casting things so if
we wanted to test this we could just select those three dots above me there and then we could just
choose run action i've personally been using the local media cast in to cast images as reminders
for various reoccurring events a good example for this is my reminder to tell me that it's been day
so on bin day the automation will run and it will cast this image telling me that it's binded
to my display and as this image takes up the full screen you can't really miss it you also
have to manually tell the device to stop casting otherwise this image will just sit there all day
another cool thing about this is it actually displays the color of bin for the day that it is
so just by looking at it i'll be able to tell that it's green bin day or if it's a recycling
day so that's been a quick look at how you'd cast a selected dashboard view or a local media source
to a supported device but before we wrap this up there's just one other point i'm just going
to quickly touch on and that point is how you can use your voice to cast a set dashboard view
to a set device you'll first need to create a script in order to actually cache your dashboard
if you followed the previous video then you'll have found out how to do using the old method
where you use the google cast service but you can also do this with the new method that we've
looked at today using the play media action so just set up a script that selects a piece of
media that you want to cast to a device and also choose your device to cast you'll then need to
open up the home assistant cloud and you'll need to scroll down to the google assistant
once that opens up you'll then just need to find that script you created in my case it's this one
here called cast lights dashboard and you just want to make sure that the expose entity option
is ticked with your scripts exposed you'll need to open up the google home app on whatever mobile
device you're using from here you're going to need to press routines and within routines we're going
to add a new one by pressing the plus button in the bottom right corner we'll then be presented
with two options that we need to fill in a starter and an action so let's start with starter by
pressing add starter our starter is going to be a voice command as we want to be able to tell google
to do something and have it cast our dashboard so go ahead and press voice command you'll then
need to enter the phrase that you want to say to google in order to get it to trigger the casting
session so in my case i'm just going to type cast lights with that done we need to add our action
so go ahead and press add action and the action that we want to select is to adjust home devices
so press that one we'll then be presented with a list of different home devices and the one that
we need is to adjust scenes so rather than ticking the little box next to adjust scenes you're going
to need to press the little arrow just to the right of it once you do that you'll hopefully
be presented with a list of the different scripts that you're currently exposing to your google home
and i can see two different scripts that i'm exposing here i've got my cast lights dashboards
and also stop casting so the one that i want is this cast lights dashboard so i'm going to
select that and then hit done and it's as simple as that now when you say that spoken phrase google
will start that casting session and it will cast whatever you've chosen to your display
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