Home Assistant is a simple platform for controlling a wide range of smart home devices thanks to numerous integration options. Home Assistant scores with a quick start-up and easy implementation of new ideas.

What is Home Assistant?

Home Assistant is an open source home automation solution for connecting, controlling and monitoring a wide variety of devices, systems or communication standards. It can be run on almost any hardware, such as a Raspberry PI, a NAS or a mini PC.

ioBroker >> Home Assistant (HA)

After a trip to other systems, I replaced my previously created setup, consisting of ioBroker, InfluxDB and Grafana, with Home Assistant. Compared to ioBroker the start with Home Assistant was much easier for me, see also: Smart Home Platform: Systems. While I was still searching for ioBroker, which frontend I could use for my dashboards, I had with Home-Assistant out of the box, I had a ready-made system. Home Assistant's Lovelance dashboards can be easily clicked together in the GUI and modified for special customizations in the Code Editor and with additional frontend packages to be adapted almost at will. I primarily use Home Assistant to control certain lights, my vacuum cleaner robot or the awning via smartphone. In addition, I use it to monitor the temperature and humidity of certain rooms, the water flow of my heating via ultrasonic sensors the electricity and water consumption the front door, a NAS and a web server. The automations range from a weather-dependent control of the robotic mower to the control of the pool pump, the heating and the dehumidifier when the pv plant or balcony power plant is producing enough electricity. In addition, I have on the basis of an old smartphone something like a weather station on the wall. I can now use it as an example to check the temperature, the weather or other values in passing or start certain actions on it.

Operation: HAOS >> Docker Container

The operating system of Home Assistant: HAOS enables the operation of Home Assistant and a variety of Docker-based Home Assistant add-ons with little to no knowledge of Linux or Docker. If you are confident enough to run Linux and Docker, you can also run Home Assistant as your own Docker container in addition to running HAOS as a VM. Here is an overview of the different installation variants: HAOS vs. Home Assistant Docker installation.

Communication: primarily WLAN and Zigbee

Besides some WLAN devices and certain DIY microcontrollers(ESP32), I use a Conbee 2 USB stick as Zigbee gateway. The integration of the Zigbee devices I originally implemented with Phoscon, then with Zigbee2MQTT and meanwhile I use Zigbee Home Automation ZHA.