My brother and I decided to set up a home automation system for our lighting, heating/cooling and multimedia systems (amongst other purposes).
The Software
The main two competitors that we looked at were Home Assistant and OpenHAB.
Whilst OpenHAB was more stable and feature-rich, we opted for Home Assistant because it looked nicer.
Although there was no official Android client EDIT: There is now an official client, there are (I haven’t tested) third party apps, like HomeAssist, Ariela, HA Client, Homy, Home Habit, WallPanel and Project Rotini.
In addition, the new Lovelace Web UI looks fantastic - so perhaps we won’t even need a native app.
Also, Home Assistant is written in Python, whilst OpenHAB is written in Java. With the interpretive nature of code execution in Python, I decided that Home Assistant would be better suited to quickly developing and deploying custom functionality
Home Assistant also supports ESPHome-compatible devices, like my NodeMCU ESP8266 boards, so I’ll be able to use them as wireless I/O devices!
Installation
EDIT: So Home Assistant and Hass.io are different things.
Home Assistant is the software, whilst Hass.io is the ochestrator (makes things work together).
Installing Home Assistant manually stops you from (easily) installing community addons.
OLD INSTRUCTIONS
Btw
sudo
everything - you know the drill.
Most guides recommend to install Home Assistant onto a Raspberry Pi, or a NUC via Hass.io - But as I already have a Debian virtual machine running in a Hyper-V server, I’ll use that instead
In ignoring all advice to use Docker and/or Python virtual environments:
Note: As of installing (30/06/2019), Home Assistant requires Python >=
3.5.3
We’ll also create a new restricted user account homeassistant
to run the software.
Configuring Home Assistant to run as a service
They recommend to use systemd
, but I’m more familiar with the init.d
approach.
This involves setting up the /etc/init.d/hass-daemon
service file
Note: The original script had bugs, so I submitted a pull request #9741 to fix it
Then run the service installer with service hass-daemon install
.
Finally, start the service with service hass-daemon start
, and head to http://<SERVER_IP>:8123
Let it run for a bit while it sets everything up. It took about a minute before I could access the webpage.
Setup & Configuration
When you first visit the control panel, you should be greeted with the Administrator account creation page
Fill in those details, and hit Create Account. Then follow the rest of the instructions - should be straightforward!
Some useful things to do