C) Home Assistant

Home Assistant stand for Open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server.

Home Assistant comes in different flavours and so called editions and it can be installed in three different ways:

• Dedicated hardware. Best solution!
• Virtual Machine, like using dedicated hardware but on shared hardware.
• Docker container, but it does not support direct Add-On integration (there are workarounds)

The Virtual Machine approach can be useful if you don't have or don't want to use dedicated hardware, but it comes with the downside of requiring USB pass-trough for hardware devices like ZigBee/Z-Wave, modbus or similar devices.

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.

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 to buy a Home Assistant Green or Home Assistant Yellow.

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 did three different installations over time, and here is why:

• I started with an old repurposed laptop (see here), but failing hardware and noisy fan where downsides.
• Then i purchased an Orange Pi 3B (see here) and leveraged that for a while, but requiring manual updates to the OS was annoying.
• At last, i purchased a Home Assistant Green (see here), both to support the project and get the best full stack support out of it. And i have been really happy so far.

As requirements, i can recoment the following:

• One wired ethernet card (as WiFi will interfere with ZigBee and similar networks)
• 4GB RAM (officially, 2GB is the minimm required, 8GB could be preferred, 4GB seems plenty at the moment)
• Any (even small) EMMC/SSD/NVWE. Using a mechanical HDD (on PC hardware) is more powerhungry and using an uSD on ARM hardware is not recomended due to poor uSD overall stability.
• 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.

Follow the C.1) HA: setup Home Assistant Green, C.1) HA: setup an OrangePi 3B or the C.2) HA on a standard PC pages.

The initial setup is described in detail on these pages, you should follow it carefully to get started.

Some notes:

• Choose a static IP
• Choose a nice hostname (ex: ha.mydoimain.com)

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.