Home Assistant

“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't.” ~ Alice

Ready to fall into a Rabbit Hole? When I first started with Home Assistant, I felt like Alice in Wonderland.

Home Assistant is an open source project with a goal of controlling and monitoring your home, business, green house etc. It runs on Linux and can be installed on bare metal (not virtualized), Docker, Proxmox, VMware etc. etc. I run mine bare metal on a Raspberry Pi 5 with 8 GigaBytes of RAM, a Geekworm X1001 PCIe M.2 Peripheral Board and a 256 GigaByte M.2 SSD. There is a pre-built image for the RPi5 to get you started. There is a very robust Add-on called "Home Assistant Google Drive Backup". To restore your installation, create a new install with the stock image, then restore from your latest backup. Home Assistant will come right up after that.

Every step in the process is detailed ad nauseum in forums and blogs. Make sure you seek guidance from more recent forum posts because Home Assistant, Add-ons, Integrations, etc. change constantly. That's what makes it "fun".

As you can see, resources are barely utilized on my RPi5.

“I almost wish I hadn’t gone down that rabbit-hole—and yet—and yet—it’s rather curious, you know, this sort of life! ” ~ Alice

I'm running an Add-on called Zigbee2MQTT which controls dozens of Zigbee devices with the help of a USB dongle from Sonoff. The devices can be controlled and queried from Google Home speakers through an integration created in the Google Developer Console.

Every instance of Home Assistant is different, based on what you want to accomplish and your ability to execute.

“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” ~ Karl Marx Commie Pig

When I finished my Home Assistant configuration ...
(Silly me, you can never actually finish Home Assistant)

“It seems very pretty,” she said when she had finished it, “but it’s rather hard to understand!” (You see she didn’t like to confess, even to herself, that she couldn’t make it out at all.) “Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas – only I don’t know exactly what they are! However, somebody killed something: that’s clear, at any rate – ” ~ Alice