So we have a smart home now a days. We run Home Assistant, Node-Red, MQTT, Zigbee2MQTT, ESPHome (and Omada Software Controller) all running in a small Raspberry Pi5 with 8GB RAM.
We have 3 Hue smart bulbs, four smart switches, and two air purifiers connected. With some additional services. But mainly, we use the Home Assistant to manage what our lights output in three different rooms.
Why Home Assistant? For privacy of course!
Why do we run Home Assistant? We had everything running with Philips Hue Bridge, everything was fast, everything worked like clock, no interruptions. But we had to use multiple different apps to handle everything, one for air purifier, one for lights etc. And then Philips decided that they want to force people to register on their cloud to manage their lights.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve been registered in there for as long as we’ve had the lights. But last few years, even if there is no need, I’ve been more concerned about privacy, and it’s started to make it’s way into everything. I wanted to make everything offline, my house, my setup, no outside influence.
But everything was triggered by the release of Raspberry Pi5. It was faster than 4, it came with huge amounts of RAM (8GB!). And I found some online shops in Europe where I could put up a pre-order and get one really fast.
So I jumped the gun, and once arrived, started tinkering and testing and figuring out the best way to get Home Assistant running with one main goal: Everything we connect, should be offline or local, only allow data to stream to our server, never send anything to outside world.
So why Raspberry Pi and not a small x86 -server? Well, I like to concept and idea of Raspberry Pi, yes they are expensive. but for me, they fit. It’s ARM so it uses really low amount of electricity. And I like the hobby nature of Raspberry PI, with the all the different HAT’s the internet has to offer. I wanted to invest into the ecosystem, even if all I end up doing is running it as a Debian Server.
How many ways are there of running Home Assistant?
As it is, a lot. But for us techiefolks doing all kinds of magic with computers. This is the part what we want, and it’s not that complicated once you actually decipher what it means. Mainly it comes to different “running methods”.
https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/#advanced-installation-methods
So after doing my fair share of figuring out how HA is built, how it works and what are the options of installing it, I figured the best way for me is to use Docker. It makes the Host machine do that, hosting of different services, and isolates everything. I do understand the point of HA OS, or any other way of installing. But for me, if I want to host anything else in the machine, I want them to be isolated. And since I’m fairly certain I could live with it, docker is the way.
Not to mention I found kick-ass instructions so that I didn’t need to do everything by myself, I needed to just adjust some things in the configurations and whatnot so that they worked for me. So 10 part blog post on how to install Home Assistant and every good addong you need: https://sequr.be/blog/2022/08/home-assistant-container-part-1-install-debian-docker-and-portainer/
And not to mention, that once installed, I could run Omada Software Controller on the same machine, via docker of course. So now I have a system that manages my Home, all running in one machine, be it network or lights or other automation I have setup.
What you miss?
You don’t get nifty Addon store where you can just install everything. You have to dockerize and connect everything manually. Thankfully, everything I actually needed are installed with the initial instructions. And the rest, well, I’m fairly certain I can do it if i try hard enough.
But yes, you do have to have knowledge about linux machines, you have to have patience, you have to understand the difference between different archs on computers. And if possible, you do need to dockerize your own software, or someone elses software.
So not the easiest path, but for me, more fun, and again, this is what I’m after. More fun while doing all this and hoping I get everything working like I want.
So how has Home Assistant treated us?
Well, as with everything, there are some growing pains.
- Not everything works every time. I’m working on this, but we do have some pains with Zigbee, Hue Lights response time and with some Zigbee light switches.
- Lights are slower to respond or have quirky behavior that they didn’t have with the Hue Bridge.
- Our UI for lights is slow, like, really slow, sometimes taking 3 seconds to sync with the actual lights.
- Not all of our equipment can be added as offline, but via cloud integration. This is dumb, since I wanted everything to be one way. Only fetch information to Home Assistant, and have every device report to Home Assistant instance, not some cloud integration.
But what works and how everything is after almost 6 months of working hours upon hours.
- We have a nice UI, even if It has taken me probably 100 hours to get running. Yes it could be nicer, but it looks nice on the phone, and it’s reasonably fast.
- We have more information centralized; TVOC, Temperature, PM2.5, Electricity price. So with lights, we have what I wanted, more information in one place so we can react with it.
- Automations are way easier since we can automate everything, not only do automations per device, but actually whole home automations.
So I would consider everything a win, with some losses in the way, I’m still teething on how to get our UI faster. I do hate that we have two air purifiers which use cloud connectivity. So in the future, I need to switch some appliances around.