Home Assistant

Easy to Deploy FOSS Home Automation

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Richard Freeman

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whoami - Rich Freeman

• By education - a Biochemist
• By employment - a Business Analyst in the Pharmaceutical Industry
• By night - a FOSS enthusiast and Gentoo Developer

• First introduced to linux from a book that included a Slackware CD ca. 1994.
• Used UMSDOS for root
• Mounted /usr from cdrom (I was poor and couldn't afford the space)
• In the late 90s started using linux more seriously with Mandrake, and then Gentoo.

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• Have been using Home Assistant for six months, and OpenHAB for ~5 years.

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rich0@gentoo.org / rich@rich0.org

Outline

Why a FOSS Solution?

My Story

Features/Capabilities

Deployment Options

Configuration

Demo

Getting Started

Why FOSS for Home Automation

• Every manufacturer already provides an integrated solution for controlling their products.
• Almost always cloud-based (Insteon shutdown)
• Non-interoperable (usually)
• Rarely support complex use cases
• FOSS Solutions
• Usually use an abstraction/driver model for interoperability
• Usually support scripting and complex use cases
• Prefer or at least offer self-hosting

Why Did I Migrate to HA?

• Previously I used OpenHAB
• Painful v2->3 migration path
• Heavy on scripting
• Scripting language is clunky
• What I saw in Home Assistant
• Configuration driven for almost all my use cases
• WebUI
• VERY easy to deploy
• Active development - very extensive support

Features/Capabilities

• Straightforward Web UI
• All configuration translates to YAML - fairly easy to comprehend/edit/etc (and interoperable with UI)
• Plugin design, with both a central repository and support for community repositories
• First class mobile apps
• Very active development and product support

Deployment Options

• Preferred
• HA Yellow - preinstalled hardware option
• HA OS - OS image for SBCs/VMs/etc that integrates with the UI (buildroot)
• HA Container Images - Runs the core, and container platform manages updates
• Alternative
• HA Core - just the HA software
• HA Supervised - shim software to manage updates and the host OS (basically build your own HA OS)

Configuration

• Integration - Driver - type of device
• Device - an instance of a device - a bulb, switch, etc
• Entity - a single control for a device (eg on/off, dimmer level, color, etc)
• Helper - a variable - entity without device
• Scene - a set of entity/setting pairs
• Automation - trigger, conditions, actions
• Scripts - a series of actions without trigger
• Dashboard - a UI view of entities/etc
• Blueprints, Areas, Zones, Tags, People

Demo

Getting Started

https://Home-assistant.io/

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Highly recommend HA OS model, followed by container

Copyright Notice

Content Copyright 2023 Richard Freeman. Some rights reserved.

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This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License.

To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0 or send a letter to:

Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA.

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