First step into Home Automation: Home Assistant

Science fiction covers the ideal home automation: waling through your house, the house artificial intelligence turning on lights, running security checks, adjusting blinds, notifying you of important things, cooking meals...

We're not cooking meals yet.

I'm putting together this blog for two reasons. For others, an insight and roadmap into Home Assistant. For me, a diary of what I did, in case I need to do it (or something similar) again.

The automation system I'm starting with Home Assistant (https://www.home-assistant.io/). It's running on a Raspberry Pi 3B+, which is the lowest Raspberry Pi that's recommended for this project. I went with HA for a variety of reasons:


  • Runs locally
  • Free/open source - a company won't come along and say "it no longer fits our profit model"
  • Active community of users and developers (probably more developer-users than user-only)

Establish goals for what you want

It can do a lot of things. So much so, it can be easy to get lost. My initial goal was to start run home security through it, but long-term it would be nice to add all of the quality-of-life improvements.

Setting up Home Assistant for the first time

Setting it up was straightforward. Your first account is an admin account - I wouldn't set it up as "you". Later on, you might want "user-you" recognized with your phone. (The first time through, I didn't save the password manager after generating the password. Tsk.)

During setup, it will give you the option to recognize devices. It is useful, but the second time setting it up, I went with a strictly manual process. During automatic set-up, it found several things:

  • Synology NAS
  • My Samsung Galaxy S7
  • Two early Sonos Play 5 speakers
The NAS had a lot of reportable sensors in it - so many, that on the second time through, I didn't add the NAS. The phone wasn't necessary immediately, but it was convenient. The Sonos speakers are limited - you can play music that is already loaded, or previously played. This is probably another reason to look into Plex and Plex-friendly speakers. (I did add the phone and Sonos.)

One of the challenges of this blog, is talking about Home Assistant and still having it be relevant 6 months later - it improves often with new releases. The UI will change, setup will change, but hopefully the scripts and tools I talk about will be useful. As this is a journey, I don't know all of the answers or best practices to start.

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