Sarah J Grubb

I'm trying home assistant

There are a varitey of smart devices in my small apartment such as: Alexa, Google home hubs, smart lights, smart plugs and cameras. While it's great to have a vireity of devices all from different companies, I'm limited not only to what I can make them do, but also to how private and secure I can keep my network.

Enter Home Assistant....

As described by the makers themsleves, Home Assistant is an

"Open source home automation that puts lcoal control and privacy first."
and not only that but the platform has thousands of integrations making it easy to controll all of my smart devices in one place. After finding out about this I definitely wanted to give a try. However, I'm still pretty new in the tech world and all the options were a little overwhelming at first. I didn't know wheter I wanted to run Home Assistant Operating System or the container based installation, or do I try the Home Assistant Supervised or Core??

Finally I landing on a decision. I had a Raspberry Pi that was running a Vector Robot Escape Pod at the time. It would be simple enough to just remove the sd card the Escape Pod lived on and utilize another sd card for HA. I choose the Home Assistant OS and wrote the image to my sd card. It seemed to go well until I put the sd card into the Raspberry Pi.....

Nothing happened

My Raspberry Pi wasn't showing up on the network and there were no lights on the Pi's ethernet port indicating any connection. I double checked all the ports again just to make sure everything was snug. Still nothing. Assuming I made a mistake with the sd card, I removed it from the Pi, re-formated and stuck it back in the Pi again. Same results. I went through this process a few times (throw in also corrupting the sd card and haveing to work through that) and finally landing on the issue.

I downloaded the OS for the wrong Raspberry Pi...

That was annoying. You see there are a few different Raspberry Pi's being utulized around the apartment and I mistakenly thought (without checking) that I was using a Raspberry Pi 4. It ended up being a Pi 3b+. With that knowledge I went back and grabbbed the correct image, did a quick flash, inserted the SD card and viola it was up and running ready for configuration. Apparently it helps to pay attention....

Cool things I've configured so far

My integrations so far consist of: Home (Metoerologisk institutt), Mobile App for my google pixel 6 (regrett buying the pixel 6, should have waited until they worked all the bugs out. But that's a different story), HACS (because the community makes some pretty cool stuff and adds the ability for even more integrations), Raspberry Pi Power Supply Checker and Google Cast. Synology DSM is also an integration, but requires two-step authentication to set up. I haven't spend the time to look into getting that to run smoothly yet.

I've configured SSH & Web Terminal as well as File Editor. File Editor is extremely useful and I'm working in it all the time.

The smart bulbs that are used are from Wyze and had to have the wyze integration from HACS before I could add it as a HA integration. Once that was done I was able to see almost all of my Wyze devices including the smart plugs from Wyze. However, in order to view the live feed of Wyze cameras I will need to reformat the sd card with RTSP. A future project for HA.

Once I was able to find and add my devices I set up a couple of practice animations. Nothing to in depth, just something to expeiriment with to make myself more familiar with how animations work. So far I have an automation set up for nightime when I plug my phone in to charge it will turn the bedroom lights out 45 seconds later. In the morning (as long as it is a workday between the hours of 7am - 8am) once I uplug my phone 30seconds later the bedroom lights will turn on. Right now they are set to their dimist setting as to not cause that rude of an awakening. Simple but nice start to creating automations!

Oh yeah, one last integration that I thought was cool: Github. This tracks your github repo issues, starts, forks and pull request. Not that I have that much going on (except for this site), but neat nonetheless.

And of course it has to be pretty!

I find the default layouts on Home Assistant to be lackluster, boring and hard to get to display the various cards in the order you like. Thanks to the great HA community there a variety of different themes, layouts and card-mod repositories you can add.

The ones I am currently using, although I'm sure I will use more later, consist of:

Card-mod gives you a little more styling options to add to each of your card, while layout-card gives more you more control of the styling of your lovelace. The lovelace animated background add the ability to choose your own animated backgrounds to the lovelace depending on what the weather is outside. Github card displays your github information in a more pleasing way.