How to Install Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi (Beginners Guide)

setting up home assistant on a Raspberry Pi is much easier than it looks in fact the hardest step is ordering the right parts starting with the obvious you'll need a Raspberry Pi I'm using the fourth gen Pi with 4 GB of RAM the third gen Pi is a bit underpowered and the fifth generation is still not fully supported so just go with the pi 4 next you'll need a case for your pie I'm using the official case but there are plenty of third party options so just take your pick you'll also need a power supply for it as this doesn't usually come included you can buy a third party power supply but I would recommend the official one in this case next for storage you want either a Micro SD card or an SSD I will be using a 32 GB micro SD card because it's the more beginner and budget friendly option however home assistant is quite aggressive on micro SD cards and they tend to break within a year or two so I didn't encourage you to upgrade to an SSD when that happens otherwise micro SD cards are perfectly fine if you're just getting your feet wet with home assistant now you'll need to slot this card into your computer or laptop during the setup process so if you don't have a built-in card reader then you need to add this to your shopping list as well next you'll need an ethernet cable to connect your Raspberry Pi to your Wi-Fi router this is required for the initial setup but it's worth keeping it wired into your router for reliability and finally the pi only has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios built in so if you want to use zigby zwave or thread-based smart home devices you will need to buy dongles that add those radios I recommend adding a zigg dongle to start out and you can watch my video on Smart Home protocols to find out why that is I'll be using a sonoff dongle for this but a con B2 or a sky connect dongle will also work to clarify this is entirely optional and and something you can add later if you prefer one more thing if you are adding a dongle like I am make sure to grab a USB type A extension as well as plugging it directly into the pie without this cable will cause some interference in case you're wondering you don't need any HDMI cables or external monitors because we will be accessing the pie remotely all of this should total around $150 or £120 British P plus shipping and links will be in the description for everything I've mentioned once you have all the parts push everything to one side and let's start the build step one is to install home assistant on the micro SD card and we're going to use the official Raspberry Pi installer to do this insert the micro SD card into your card reader go to raspberry pie.com software download and open the Raspberry Pi imager choose your Raspberry Pi version for me that's the pi 4 choose operating system other specific purpose OS home assistance and home automation home assistant again make sure you choose the correct Pi version choose storage select your micro SD card and be aware this will override everything on the selected storage so just double check its right before going any further click next and wait for it to install home assistant once that's done remove your micro SD card from your computer or laptop step two is to fully assemble your Raspberry Pi carefully place your inside your case and close it up slot in the micro SD card plug in your ethernet cable and the other end into your Wi-Fi router if you're using a zigby dongle first plug in your USB extension cable and then plug your dongle into the extension finally plug in your power supply and it will boot up automatically step three is to load up home assistant and this is where you access your pie remotely so on your computer or laptop open up a new tab and go to home assist local colon 8123 at this point you should see a welcome screen and when you first load it up it will take about 20 minutes to configure itself once it's ready you'll be asked to create an account and make a note of these details because you cannot recover them later put in your location so home assistant can apply the relevant settings and this can also be used in location based automations later on choose if you want to share any of your information at this point it will try to find and pair any Wi-Fi devices in your home and it will ask you to assign those to different areas or rooms in your house after that you'll be in the home assistant dashboard step four is to pair your zigby devices assuming you're using a dongle like I am if you're not you can just skip this step go to settings then devices and services you should see your zigby dongle listed here in the discovered section if you don't make sure the dongle is plugged in correctly then restart your home assistant go to configure then submit and once it's done click finish now click the add integration button then choose add sigb device this will start scanning for any sigb devices that are currently in pairing mode so grab your devices and put them into pairing mode you should slowly start to see them populate here where you can give each device a name and assign it to an area of your house you can also come back here at any time to add more zigby devices if you need to now click the back button and choose devices here you can see everything currently paired to home assistant and you can click into individual devices to see more information about them including battery life and current state step five is to start using home assistant because the main installation is now complete you'll see all your paired devices under the overview Tab and you should be able to control them entirely from this screen now there's obviously a lot more you can do here including setting up automations and customizing your dashboard but I'll save all that for another video because there are two more optional steps I need to cover step six is to consider enabling home assistant Cloud this allows you to remotely control your devices away from home and enable Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant to control devices with your voice however this is a paid add-on and after a 30-day trial you'll have to pay either $650 per month or $65 for the year you can get these features without paying a subscription but the workarounds aren't nearly as straightforward or as reliable and I'll save that topic for another video as well if you plan to use homekit with home assistant then you don't actually need this add-on because there's a free homekit integration you can use that will basically give you these features and of course if you don't care about remote access or third party voice control then you can ignore this part entirely the last step is to enable automatic backups and while this this is entirely optional I strongly recommend you take a few minutes to set this up trust me when I say future you will be very grateful that you did especially when your SD card decides to call it quits home assistant has an excellent backup and restore feature so if you ever lose everything you can quickly restore a recent backup now there are a few ways to do this but I recommend the Google Drive add-on this will take frequent backups and it will store them both locally and off system in your Google Drive account to install this go to settings add-ons click add-on store in the bottom corner then in the top Corner click the three dots and choose repositories paste in the link I'll provide in the video description click add close the window and refresh the page you should now see the Google Drive backup add-on which you can go ahead and install turn all of these options on start the add-on then click open web UI go through the steps to link your Google Drive account and once that's done you can click settings to adjust how often backups are taken and how many backups are stored at any one time so that's it you're all set you can jump into home assistant and see just how deep the rabbit hole goes but I have a lot more home assistant content planned so subscribe for that and I will see you in the next one

Channel: Smart Home Theory

Views: 2,094

Keywords:

Id: xSqopd0eARI

Length: 8min 20sec (500 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 16 2024