Installing Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi or a PC

in a previous video I explained why I'm choosing home assistant to be the smart home brands of the brand new house that I recently bought I also recommended the home assistant yellow Smart Hub to anyone who wanted to get into home assistant for the first time in the video I showed you how easy it is to get set up and how to create your first automation unfortunately though the home assistant yellow is quite expensive and because it's so popular you'll often need to wait a long time for them to come back into stock and ship out to you once you've ordered it which can be quite frustrating and whilst the yellow is pretty powerful and can handle dozens and dozens of smart devices you might want to upgrade to something more powerful later on in your smart home Journey when you've Fallen well and truly down the rabbit hole and have a couple of hundred smart devices luckily home assistant can be installed on a huge number of different types of Hardware like an Intel Nook PC Raspberry Pi or even an old computer or laptop you might have sitting around at home it doesn't matter if you're using a home assistant yellow a PC or a Raspberry Pi the software functionality and user experience is the exact same across all of them in this video I'm going to show you how to install home assistant onto a Raspberry Pi or a PC so that you can get the exact same home assistant experience using bits you might already have lying around at home let's take a look [Music] before we get started there are a few things that I need to explain firstly there's actually more than one type of home assistant installation method the two most popular are the home assistant operating system and the home assistant container installation methods the home assistant yellow comes pre-installed with the home assistant operating system and that is also the version that I'm going to be talking about in this video and installing on my part in my PC it's the most common easy to use and flexible version of Home assistant and the one that I'm going to recommend to most people in my old smart home I ran home assistant container for several years using Docker on an Intel Nook PC if you want to know more about the home assistant container installation and how it's different from the operating system version then you should definitely check out the videos I made about this in the past I've got a whole playlist of videos all about how I use Docker and home assistant and I've put a link to it in the description below I had absolutely no dramas with home assistant container it was Rock Solid and a really great way for me to learn about Docker but am I going to be running Docker again in my new smart home stick around until the end of this video and I'll give you a sneak peek into what I'm using but anyway in this video I'm going to show you how to install the home assistant operating system so that you get the exact same experience and functionality as the yellow once it's up and running one of the great things about the yellow is that it has a built-in zigbee coordinator which lets you pair zigbee based smart home devices and sensors directly to home assistant without buying every single manufacturer's Hub a Raspberry Pi or old PC won't have a zigbee coordinator built into it but luckily you can buy a USB version online that will work great with home assistant for less than fifty dollars the ones that I would recommend are the sonoff USB 3 dongle which you can pick up on Amazon or the home assistant Sky connect which is made by the nabukasa team a company that supports the development of Home assistant the sky connect is my favorite zigbee coordinator and it's actually the one that I use in my own home not only is it designed to be used with home assistant but there will also be some firmware upgrades available for it soon that will make it work with thread and matter devices making it future proof as well but unfortunately the sky connect is often out of stock and hard to get shipped quickly I've used both of these in my smart home at different times with more than 60 different zigbee devices connected to it and they've both been Rock Solid if the word zigbee is entirely foreign to you and you've just gotten really confused about what I'm talking about then take a look at my what is zigbee video which explains it all in way more detail I've actually got a few zigbee videos in the playlist that will teach you everything that I know about zigbee and home assistant I've linked these in the description as well now that that's out of the way let's get started and install the home assistant operating system on this old Raspberry Pi that I had lying around in my nerd cupboard the home assistant developers recommend using a Raspberry Pi 4 which is more powerful than previous versions but but sadly pies are really hard to come by these days due to the chip shortage so I'm going to be using this Raspberry Pi 3 that I had lying around a Raspberry Pi 3 will work perfectly well for a small smart home with a handful of devices and this is actually the Raspberry Pi that I used to use for home assistant for over a year when I first started out you'll also need an official power supply that matches your Raspberry Pi don't go with a cheaper alternative as they really do need a very stable power system to work properly and you'll need a Micro SD card that is at least 32 gigabytes in size you then need a computer with an SD card reader so that you can Flash the home assistant software onto it a lot of laptops have SD card readers built into them or you can pick one up online for a few dollars now go to the home assistant website into the Raspberry Pi installation page these are the instructions we're going to be following and I've linked to them in the description below they're not that complicated you just need to make sure that you have all the bits and pieces that I just mentioned firstly plug the SD card into the computer and then go and download the image flashing software called bellina etcher once it's installed open it up and select the flash from URL option copy the correct URL from the home assistant installation instructions for your version of the pi I once accidentally installed the pi 4 version onto a pi 3 and wanted for about an hour why I just couldn't get it to work properly don't be like me pay attention to the small things once you've got the correct URL copied paste it into the bellina etcher tool and let it download the image now select the target which is the SD card that you plugged into your computer earlier the one you need to pick should be pretty obvious from the list click the go button and it will start copying the home assistant operating system software onto your SD card which is going to take a minute once it's done we'll remove the SD card from our PC and plug it into the pi then we'll plug in our network cable yes you really should hardwire your home assistance over into your network in fact you'll have to in order to get it up and running and then you can later on set up Wi-Fi if you'd like to but I really recommend that you hardwire in as many devices as possible especially when they're as important as this next you'll need to plug in your USB zigbee dongle I again highly recommend that you plug the USB dongle into a USB extension cable rather than directly into the pi this helps reduce electrical interference and improves the performance and reliability of your zigbee network and finally we plug in the power cable a few minutes after you've powered up your pie you should be able to open up a web browser and go to home assistant colon 8123 just like I did in that previous video about the home assistant yellow you'll follow the same setup wizard setting up your username password and location information and at the end of it you'll have a home assistant setup exactly like the home assistant yellow just like before you should see that it's detected any compatible smart devices on your network including whatever USB zigbee stick you've plugged in to set up your Raspberry Pi based zigbee Hub just click the configure button and follow the setup wizard you can now add zigbee devices directly to your home assistant just like we did with the yellow by clicking the add device button and then pairing your devices normal so as you can see installing home assistant onto a Raspberry Pi isn't really that complicated unfortunately installing the home assistant OS onto a PC is a little bit more complex first you need to boot into a Linux operating system and then copy the home assistant image onto the internal hard disk I'm going to show you how to do this using an Intel Nook PC but it will be the same process if you're using an old computer laptop or any other x86 based personal computer because this process is so involved I've also written down step-by-step instructions in an article on my home automation guy website which I've Linked In the description below so you don't need to pause this video repeatedly or try and read commands off a blurry screen capture alright let's get started you're going to need two USB thumb drives with some pretty decent storage capacity and the same bellina etcher tool that we use for the Raspberry Pi we then need to go and download the latest Ubuntu LTS version from the Ubuntu desktop website now we plug our first USB drive into our PC open up Ballina etcher and choose to flash the Ubuntu ISO image file to the USB drive once it's done remove that USB drive from the computer and plug in your second USB drive you should make sure that the second one is formatted with a fat based file system not NTFS we'll now head over to the home assistant website to the installation page and download the latest home assistant operating system version for x86 PCS once it's downloaded copy this dot image.xz file to your second USB stick we've now got everything we need to get started so go plug in your Intel NOC PC or your old computer and Boot It Up you'll need to make sure that you boot from the first USB drive most bioses will let you choose what you boot from either in the Bios itself or by pressing a key during the boot up sequence to show you the boot options if all went well Ubuntu should now boot up on your PC and when you're given the option choose try Ubuntu this will load up Ubuntu from your usb key and not actually load anything from the computer's hard disk once you get to the Ubuntu desktop plug in your second USB drive and open up a terminal window now we're going to flash the internal hard disk of your old PC or Nook with the homeless assistant image that we downloaded onto the second USB drive we're going to run the lsblk command in the terminal to list out all the hard drives that are attached to our computer this should be both your USB keys and the internal hard drive on the computer itself in the left hand column of the output you'll see the names of the physical disks themselves and on the right hand side you'll see the mount points on my screen here you can see that my second USB stick is referred to as sdb with a mount point of Slash media Ubuntu USB key and the internal hard disk of my PC is known as nvme 0n1 and we want to write the home assistant image from the USB key to nvme 0n1 the names of these may be different on your computer so pay attention to write the image to the disk we use the XZ command and you'll find it all listed out on the home automation guy article that I mentioned earlier the command is going to take a few minutes to run and once it's done we can unplug all of our USB drives and reboot the PC you should see it booting up the home assistant OS once it's loaded up go back to another computer and you'll be able to navigate to Home assistant colon 8123 or its IP address in the 8123 port and you'll be able to finish setting up home assistant just like we did with the Raspberry Pi or home assistant ELO and there you go whilst I highly recommend the home assistant yellow to anyone who's just getting started with home assistant I understand that there are Financial or practical reasons why you might want to choose another installation method the two ways I just showed you are a little more complicated but you end up with the same result using a knock or a more powerful PC to run home assistant is a great way to make sure that your home automation system will be powerful enough to grow as your smart home gets more and more devices added to it and like I mentioned at the beginning of the video another installation method is to run Ubuntu on the NOC or the PC and then run home assistant on it in a Docker container and I've made several videos about this before and as I said they're in the description below I learned a ton about Docker by running my smart home this way for the last two years and I still recommend it as a great way to run home assistant but what am I going to do now in my brand new smart home well when I first made all of those home assistant Docker videos I had a ton of comments from you guys telling me that I should run proxmox and virtualize my home assistant that sounded pretty cool to me and it meant an opportunity to learn new things about virtualization and running a smart home in a different way so I built myself a rack mounted server and I installed proxmox on it and then put the home assistant operating system inside a virtual machine but that is going to be the topic of another video if you want to see what kind of Home Server I built and how I installed proxmox and home assistant on it then make sure you're subscribed to the channel so that you know when those videos are released and so that together we can make your home smarter

Channel: Home Automation Guy

Views: 99,533

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Id: GOviT62O-cM

Length: 12min 42sec (762 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 11 2023