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| - | ====== Home Assistant ====== | + | ====== |
| [[https:// | [[https:// | ||
| ==== Which Home Assistant edition? ==== | ==== Which Home Assistant edition? ==== | ||
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| + | Home Assistant comes in different flavours and so called | ||
| + | |||
| + | There are three ways: | ||
| + | * Dedicated hardware | ||
| + | * Virtual Machine | ||
| + | * Docker container | ||
| + | |||
| + | The docker container approach has some limitations, | ||
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| + | I choose to use dedicated hardware because i want my smart home to be independent from my home-server services. In a way, the smart home needs to be operative even if/when my home IT services are down or the internet is not working. | ||
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| ==== Where to run Home Assistant ==== | ==== Where to run Home Assistant ==== | ||
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| + | Home Assistant offers different ways to self-host a standalone instance of Home Assistant on dedicated hardware. The easiest, which is also a good way to support the project itself, is tu buy a [[https:// | ||
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| + | The green is a fully functional hardware with small form factor ready to plug & run. The yellow is quite similar, but you provide yourself a Raspberry Pi4 CPU board. | ||
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| + | I choose to self-host Home Assistant on my own hardware, i picked an oldish laptop to leverage the low-power conusmption. As requirements, | ||
| + | * One wired ethernet card (as WiFi will interfere with ZigBee and similar networks) | ||
| + | * 8GB RAM (officially, | ||
| + | * Any (even small) SSD/NVWE. A traditional HDD will also do the job, but be more power hungry. | ||
| + | * At least one, better two or three, USB ports | ||
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| + | You can place this computer in a strategic point in your house, to maximize the ZigBee or Z-Wave rage and signal distribution. You can start anywhere, and then move it if needed, this is specially easy on a laptop where you don't have to power it down. | ||
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| ==== Install Home Assistant ==== | ==== Install Home Assistant ==== | ||
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| + | Follow the official [[https:// | ||
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| + | As a general note, Home Assistant //does not provide an installer// | ||
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| + | I already had a Linux installed, so i just downloaded the IMG file from Home Assistant download page and flashed it with a typical: | ||
| + | <code bash> | ||
| + | dd if=home-assistant.img of=/dev/sda | ||
| + | </ | ||
| + | |||
| + | **Beware:** the above command will **destroy** your computer operating system and replace it with Home Assistant. You will not even be able to reboot, only power cycling will work. | ||
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| + | Make sure your wired network is plugged, as after the first boot you will need to fire up a web browser and locate your Home Assistant IP (see your DHCP logs...). In any case, you can check Home Assistant console output on Home Assistant computer screen: it should tell you which IP address it is using. You can also perform basic maintanance tasks, which includes IP changes, from this CLI. | ||
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| ==== Setup Home Assistant ==== | ==== Setup Home Assistant ==== | ||
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| + | The initial setup is described in detail [[https:// | ||
| + | |||
| + | Some notes: | ||
| + | * Choose a static IP | ||
| + | * Choose a nice hostname (ex: // | ||
| + | |||
| + | Then you should plug-in your protocol dongles, for example your ZigBee coordinator and set those up as well. See the dedicated pages. | ||
| + | |||
| + | At this point you can start designing your rooms and areas. I suggest you define at this point all the floors and rooms that you have, so adding devices, lights and switches will be easier later on. | ||
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| + | You will want to install the File Editor extension, and sooner or later you will need to edit your **configuration.yaml** file by hand. | ||
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