Introduction

Home Assistant is an open-source home automation platform that allows you to control and automate various devices in your home. One of the most popular ways to run Home Assistant is on a Raspberry Pi, a low-cost and low-power device that you easily configure to run the software. In this series of posts, we will go through the following:

• Setting up Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi
• Saving configuration in version-controlled files
• Integrating with other Smart Home products
• Improving databases and monitoring
• Customizations with add-ons

Step 1: Setting up the Raspberry Pi

To get started, we need to set up Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi. You can always check for more up-to-date instructions over on the Home Assistant Installation guide, but essentially you will need the following items:

• A Raspberry Pi (A Raspberry Pi 4 is preferred, but a Raspberry Pi 3 will work too. I’m using a Pi 3 and do not have experience with older models to know if they’re powerful enough)
• A power supply for the Raspberry Pi (obvious)
• A microSD card with at least 8GB of storage (to hold the operating system and Home Assistant software)
• A computer with an SD card reader (to flash the operating system onto the microSD card)
• Ethernet cable for installation. After installation, it can work with Wi-Fi, but it might not be stable enough

Step 2: Write OS image

Once you have these items, you must install Home Assistant on the Pi. There are various ways of running Home Assistant on a Pi, but for this series, we will be running the Home Assistant Operating System. To flash the operating system on the Pi, we use balenaEtcher (a handy tool to flash OS images to SD cards and USB drives).

1. Click on Flash from URL, and paste in the URL according to the model of your Pi. At the time of writing and for my Pi 3, I used:

https://github.com/home-assistant/operating-system/releases/download/9.4/haos_rpi3-64-9.4.img.xz

2. Click on Select target or Change to select the SD card you want to flash
3. Select your SD card of choice and click Select
4. Click on Flash to flash the OS to the SD card
5. When the flashing is completed, you will get a confirmation screen, and you can safely remove the SD card from your computer, and we can continue on the Pi

Step 3: Start the Raspberry Pi

1. Insert the SD card into your Pi
2. Plug in the network cable
3. Attach the power cable
4. If you’ve attached a monitor to your Pi, you should be able to follow the status messages; otherwise, give it a few minutes before trying to connect to HomeAssistant
5. Open a browser on your computer, and browse to https://homeassistant.local:8123

Depending on your network and browser configuration, you might have to access Home Assistant by specifying the IP http://#.#.#.#:8123 (replace #.#.#.# withour Pi’s IP Address)

Next steps and configuring Home Assistant

After setting up Home Assistant, the next step is configuring it. Configuration involves adding your various devices and services to Home Assistant so that you can control and automate them. Configuring Home Assistant is quite involved, and we will discuss it in the next post. For now, poke around and get a feel for it, as this is where you will spend most of your spare/free/waking time in the next couple hours/days/months/years 😈

One of the best resources is the Home Assistant documentation, which provides a wealth of information on how to set up and configure different devices and services.

Conclusion

Setting up Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi can initially seem daunting. Still, with a bit of patience and help from online resources, you can have your home automation up and running in no time. The end result is a powerful and flexible platform that allows you to control and automate various devices in your home, giving you more control and convenience than ever before.

❗ Please note: To actually use and benefit from the full capabilities of Home Assistant, you need to have compatible and integrated devices.

Best of luck with setting up your Home Assistant!