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- | ====== Home Assistant ====== | + | ====== |
[[https:// | [[https:// | ||
==== Which Home Assistant edition? ==== | ==== Which Home Assistant edition? ==== | ||
+ | |||
+ | 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, | ||
+ | |||
+ | 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 ==== | ||
+ | |||
+ | 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:// | ||
+ | |||
+ | 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. | ||
+ | |||
+ | 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 | ||
+ | |||
+ | 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. | ||
+ | |||
==== Install Home Assistant ==== | ==== Install Home Assistant ==== | ||
+ | |||
+ | Follow the official [[https:// | ||
+ | |||
+ | As a general note, Home Assistant //does not provide an installer// | ||
+ | |||
+ | 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. | ||
+ | |||
+ | 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. | ||
+ | |||
==== Setup Home Assistant ==== | ==== Setup Home Assistant ==== | ||
+ | |||
+ | 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. | ||
+ | |||
+ | 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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