A full tour of one Elgato Stream Deck Plus, three pages deep, wired into Home Assistant to run an entire office.
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1 months ago
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Review
educational
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Big Idea
The argument in one line.
A programmable control surface becomes a real efficiency tool when you push the logic into Home Assistant scripts and let each button just call one.
Who This Is For
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
You own or are considering a Stream Deck and want to see a heavily optimized real-world configuration instead of a spec rundown.
You run a home studio or desk setup and want one-press control of lights, blinds, climate and cameras.
You use Home Assistant or Google Home and wonder whether Home Assistant is worth the switch.
SKIP IF…
You only want a hardware review or buying comparison between Stream Deck models.
You don't use smart home devices, since most of the setup depends on Home Assistant.
TL;DR
The full version, fast.
The Elgato Stream Deck Plus is a programmable panel of buttons, LCD keys and dials, and its main advantage over rivals is a marketplace of 600+ plugins. The creator's setup lives on one main page where dials control volume, air conditioning and blinds through Home Assistant, while buttons trigger scripts such as a studio power toggle that reads the light state to decide whether to open or shut the office. A third page holds blind presets, and a legacy first page keeps weather, stopwatch, app launchers and YouTube stats. Gemini helped write scripts and icons, saving weeks.
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A Stream Deck is only as capable as its plugin marketplace, and Elgato's has over 600 plugins versus a much thinner list on rivals like the Loupedeck CT.
One dial can hold three actions at once: rotate left, rotate right and press, so a single knob can lower, raise and toggle the air conditioner.
Put the logic in Home Assistant scripts and let the Stream Deck only call them, so the device stays simple and the automations stay reusable.
A single studio power button can read whether the lights are on to decide whether it should start the day or shut it down.
Showing device state on the key itself, like cool versus heat on the aircon dial, prevents mistakes like running the wrong mode all winter.
Custom icons that tell a story, like blind positions, make a page of presets readable at a glance.
Generative AI saved potentially weeks on Home Assistant scripting and icon creation, even after hours and days of setup.
Most people live on one page 99% of the time, so build the main page around daily actions and push rarely used tools to side pages.
A robot vacuum button can toggle between start and return to dock because Home Assistant knows the vacuum's state.
Dial back the Stream Deck backlight when filming it, because maximum brightness blows out on camera.
Takeaway
Let the device call scripts, not hold logic
WHAT TO LEARN
The best control surface is a thin trigger layer over scripts that live in a platform you can edit, test and reuse.
Check the plugin marketplace before buying any programmable control panel, because hardware that cannot reach your tools is limited.
Use dials for continuous or three-way actions, since rotate left, rotate right and press can cover down, up and toggle in one control.
Build presets as Home Assistant scripts and have the buttons only call them, so the logic stays in one place.
Make keys display live state, such as cooling versus heating, so you never guess what a device is doing.
Design one main page for daily use and keep rarely used tools on side pages you swipe to.
Use AI tools to draft scripts and icons, but expect to spend hours or days tuning the final result.
Glossary
Terms worth knowing.
Stream Deck Plus
Elgato's programmable control panel with customizable LCD buttons, a touch strip and four rotary dials that can be assigned to computer or smart home actions.
Home Assistant
An open source smart home platform that connects devices from many brands and lets you build scripts and automations that run them together.
Action trigger
A Stream Deck dial action that lets one dial hold three separate actions: rotate left, rotate right and press in.
Plugin marketplace
Elgato's store of third-party add-ons that give the Stream Deck new actions like weather, YouTube stats and smart home control.
The Script
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This right here is the Elgato Stream Deck Plus, and I've now been using it for over a year at this point, and it is hands down one of the best purchases that I've ever made. in relation to my desk setup. Now I have mentioned it in several of my recent desk accessory style videos, but I've always had it in the back of my mind that one day I would make a full dedicated video about the thing.
And so today is the day that that finally comes to fruition. And real quick, I need to make it crystal clear that this video is not sponsored by Elgato whatsoever. In fact, as I said, I bought this Stream Deck plus myself and Elgato have literally no clue that I'm even making this video.
So again, not sponsored by them whatsoever. I just genuinely find it so beneficial to my workflow that I thought that it was about time I make a video about it. Now, real quick, for those who have never heard of this device, In short, it's essentially a programmable control panel for your computer.
There's a whole heap of variants that you can get, many of which are made by other manufacturers, but even Elgato themselves make a bunch of different versions too, but they all offer variations of the same sort of hardware. So at the very least, you'll usually get a bunch of buttons like these ones here, usually with customizable LCD screens behind each, but then there's also a lot of these slightly more advanced variants that offer expanded bits of hardware like the swappable touch panel and rotary dials found here.
here on my Stream Deck Plus. But they all basically do the same thing in that they connect to your computer of choice and then talk to a corresponding bit of software that allows you to then assign the buttons and knobs to control pretty much anything on your computer and... even beyond your computer in some cases so you've got your basics like launching apps or performing keyboard shortcuts you can also control your computer's volume and so forth but then you can also go pretty wild with the setup if you like assigning buttons to automations and even advanced smart home controls now do you need one of these devices absolutely not but are they a heck of a lot of fun and can they substantially improve your efficiency Hell yes, they can.
Now, as a side note, whilst yes, as I said, there are a bunch of third -party versions of the Stream Deck available to buy, many of which I'm sure are really great in their own right, the reason that I think the offerings by Elgato are so good basically comes down to one main reason, the plugin marketplace. Like a year or two back, I was actually using a similar but different device called the Loop Deck CT, and man, its marketplace was just so limited compared to Elgato's marketplace, and this therefore made it so much less capable.
So you can have incredible hardware all you like, but if the third -party plugin support is limited, then it's tough to push the device to do exactly what you might want it to. Whereas if you take one scroll down the entire list of plugins available on the Elgato marketplace, you'll see that at least at the time of making this video, there are well over 600 plugins available.
Anyway, that's just my two cents. You're obviously free to go with a non -Elgato device. And as I said, they're definitely not paying me to say any of this.
So it doesn't make any difference to me if you go with another option, but definitely do some research on the marketplace of any other device that you might be looking at picking up just to ensure that it has a solid lineup of plugins first. All right, let's now dive into my Stream Deck Plus configuration because I've spent a really, really long time setting this up so that it suits my workflow perfectly.
My entire configuration boils down to three main pages. And this second page is actually where I leave my Stream Deck pretty much 99 .99 % of the time. And that just means what I would call my secondary pages they're just one swipe away to either side.
But as I said, this right here is my main setup and we're actually gonna start with this bottom section first before then moving onto the buttons at the top. So down here we have a very simple clock and date plugin which has been set up using the stock clocks plugin. You can see the various configurations that I have set up here and I've just left the default dial action set to start a timer, which I never use.
but it's nice in case I ever do. Next to that, I have a very simple output device control plugin added, which not only shows me a visual indicator of my computer's current volume, but I can also, of course, use the actual dial to control my computer's volume too. And pressing that dial also mutes or unmutes my computer's audio as well.
Next to that, I actually have two action triggers set up for my third and fourth dials. So under this dial section, you just drag and drop these action triggers onto whatever space you like. Then you can just double click them to open them.
And this allows you to set up basically three separate button presses for the price of one. So a rotate left will do one thing, a rotate right will do another, and then a press in will do a third. And as you can see, this is actually the first of many, and I mean many, home assistant shortcuts that I've set up.
So let's go through each one of them. This one here, if you couldn't already tell, is linked to my air conditioner, which I've managed to plug into my home assistant setup using a Celio Breeze Lite device. And I've basically set this up so that rotating the dial left turns the temperature down, rotating it right, turns it up, and pressing the button toggles it on or off.
I've also customized the label of the middle icon to show the state of the aircon, so whether it's set to cool or heat, which is so useful because before I set this up, there were so many times I'd be thinking that the heater was running in the middle of winter when really the mode was set to cool and I was freezing my pants off before I realized.
Then if we come back and open this next action trigger, you may or may not be able to tell, but these have been set up to act as triggers for the blinds in my office. So rotating left closes all three smart blinds, rotating right opens them, and then pressing the middle button pauses them wherever they're at.
So I'll often use this when I'm filming in my office, both for A -roll and B -roll, depending on the shot. But obviously sometimes I want one blind open and two closed or two open and one closed. So if we come back and I swipe over to my third page here, as you can see, this entire page is filled with various blind presets that I use all the time.
So we've got all blinds fully open, all blinds fully closed, then all open except the one to the right of my desk set to about 75 % because in the morning the sun blazes through the window and blinds me, pun intended. So setting that to 75 % blocks it from doing so.
And then the same thing happens in the afternoon, but through the window on my left. So that's what this button does. It sets that specific blind to about 75 % while the other two get fully opened.
and so on and so forth the icons kind of tell a story on what the blinds will do when i press these other buttons and two quick notes here firstly all of these are actually presets that i've set up using scripts via the home assistant platform so home assistant is doing all of the heavy lifting here and my stream deck is just calling those scripts when i press their respective buttons but then secondly if you're wondering how i got all these neat little custom icons that match the state of the blinds well while i'm not normally a huge proponent of generative ai for these little home projects, that is where I'm more than happy to utilize it as a tool.
So as such, I actually used Google Gemini to help me create each of these specific icons. And as for all the scripting within Home Assistant itself, and really most of my entire Home Assistant configuration, that was another area that I heavily leaned upon Gemini. And whilst I still poured hours and probably days into getting it all set up once all was said and done, it probably still saved me potentially weeks worth of time that's how useful it was.
Now back on the other two pages, all of the rest of my icons, I actually set up myself or created using assets from this Hexaza Stream Deck icon pack. And in fact, all of these icons on the second page here were created by extracting these blank background assets from the Hexaza icon pack, which I then imported into Photoshop.
Then I just downloaded and imported various icons from the Flat Icon website to match what the triggers were. So let's quickly run through the rest of these. This first one is possibly my favorite because it toggles a custom script that I've set up, which essentially acts as a smart master power switch for my entire office.
So check this out. This is the studio power toggle sequence where it basically uses the state of the studio lights to determine what actions it should perform. So in the morning, when all the lights are off, it'll detect that and therefore open all three blinds, but only two of them all the way.
And that remaining front right one will get opened to 75 and it'll then turn on all the various lights and switches that I've set up in my studio too. But then when I press that button at the end of every day, it'll detect that the lights are already on and it'll then perform these next set of actions, which as you can see, turns off my air con, it closes all of the blinds and then proceeds to turn off the various lights and switches in my office too.
I honestly love this script and as you can imagine, I use it literally every single day. Then these next two buttons are set up to toggle different groups of lights in my office. So this button will toggle all the lights without obviously affecting the blinds or the air con.
Then this next one will toggle just the lights at my computer desk, which I often need to turn off for filming purposes. Then this next button is actually one of the more recent buttons that I set up and it just toggles power to the camera in my top down station. But because I film basically all of my top down shots in 8K now, my little Sony A7R Mark V, which is a recipe for overheating.
I also have a little fan attached to the camera, which also gets turned on or off when I press this button. The only thing I'll say is that I often forget to turn this off because it's in a different location to my top -down area. So I have just recently picked up a separate standalone wifi button, which I'll mount in my top -down filming area once it arrives.
And once that's set up, I'll probably replace this button on my stream deck, but I'll cross that bridge when we get to it. Then we have three more dedicated buttons for my aircon. And I know it might seem like a lot, but you have to understand I've installed my aircon remote next to my office light switches and smart blind control wheel purely for any guests who come into the office.
But I don't want to have to touch that thing myself at all if I can't avoid it. And I literally never have to thanks to this very setup. So this first button is actually the primary toggle to turn on or off my aircon.
But as you can see, it differs from the knob down here because it shows the current temperature, not whether it's set to cooling or heating. I did try and incorporate both the temperature state and the heating slash cooling state onto this one button. But unfortunately, I wasn't able to do so without compromising the look of the button itself, if that makes sense.
Hence why I've got the two states separated like so. Next to that, as you can probably tell, I have two dedicated buttons, one to switch the aircon mode to cooling and the other to switch it to heating and now that I think about it I could possibly combine this into a single button that toggles between the two but then I wouldn't have these fancy cooling and heating icons visible at the same time so yeah we'll see whether that's something I change in the near future as well.
The last button on the second page here as you might be able to tell is simply a toggle to start my studio vacuum which I use several times a week. Again the beauty of setting this up via the Home Assistant platform is that it's able to detect when the robot vacuum is docked and when it is pressing the button will start a cleaning cycle, but then once it's out cleaning, when I then press the button, it'll know to instead return back to the dock.
And it's stuff like this that makes Home Assistant such an incredible platform that's seriously worth exploring. Like I used to be pretty satisfied with using Google Home and controlling everything via my phone, but honestly, having spent a lot of time using Home Assistant over the past year or so, It is just so much more versatile, so I do highly recommend looking into it.
But then we come to my first page, and this is essentially an adapted version of the main setup that I used to use before I really started exploring the Home Assistant platform. But a lot of these tools are only very rarely used these days, hence why, as I said, I typically live on that second page 99 % of the time. but let's run through these one by one.
This first toggle is one that I used to love having always visible on my stream deck. As you can see, it is a custom weather plugin and you essentially create yourself a free weather API key on a website called weatherapi .com. Then you enter it into the plugin settings, then insert your city name, set your temperature units, tweak any other settings as you like, And once complete, you get this lovely little weather icon along with the current temperature, which I reckon is super neat.
This next button is set up as a very simple stopwatch using the default stopwatch plugin. Again, I don't really use this anymore, but back when I did, I actually took the time to tweak the appearance so that when you press it, it changes into this pretty cool looking and dynamic stopwatch. And what's really neat is that you can then pause the stopwatch by pressing once and you can then completely reset it by long pressing.
Next to that, we've got two open application shortcuts. The first one opens the App Store. The second opens the LinkMyDroid app, which is an incredible bit of software for anyone who uses both a Mac device and an Android phone.
More on that in a future video. But then moving down to the bottom row here, this first icon is another open application shortcut, and it's set up to launch my current screen recording app of choice, Screen Studio. In fact, I'd probably say that out of every button on this page, this is probably the one that I use the most often.
This next button is set up as a hotkey shortcut and it performs the keyboard shortcut shift command P, which is tied to a third party app that I have installed called Color Picker. It's a free app and as you can see, when I press it, it launches this nifty little Color Picker interface. Second to last, as you can see, is a third party plugin that shows my current YouTube subscriber count and that's been set up using a plugin called YouTube Stats Tracker.
For this one, you simply create your own API key, enter your channel ID, and that's it. From then onwards, you get to see a real -time, up -to -date subscriber count.
Lastly, we have a run shortcut button, which has been set up using a third -party plugin called Shortcuts, and this lets you trigger macOS shortcuts via your Stream Deck, and this particular shortcut just toggles between my system light and system dark thing. The only other thing that's different on this first page is that I have a different action trigger set up down the bottom here.
If we double -click to open it, this literally just acts as a simple brightness control for the Stream Deck backlight, which I basically only use whenever I'm actually filming the Stream Deck, like this video, for example, because having it set to its maximum brightness is usually a little too bright. So I use this to dial it back.
And if I ever want to put my Stream Deck to sleep, I can use that middle button to do so. But there you have it. That is my entire Stream Deck Plus setup.
And as you can see, it has been very highly optimized and really dialed in to suit my workflow to a T, but I'm always open two suggestions on how I could better utilize this incredible tool, because honestly, that's exactly what it is to me, an incredible tool that levels up my efficiency big time. If you enjoyed the video, then a sub to the channel would be hugely appreciated, but that's it.
Thank you all very much for watching and I'll catch you later.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
One year in, the creator calls the Stream Deck Plus one of the best purchases he has made. The video is a complete tour of how he configured it, page by page.
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