I recently started automating things in our new house, and a colleague of mine recommended me “Home Assistant“, which is a free and open-source home automation software written in Python with a focus on local-control and privacy.
Before I was living in an apartment and therefore didn’t have much to automate except for lights, which Philips Hue could handle exceptionally well in such a small composition. Well, now when things start to become more serious, I thought let write words down to be able to go back and see what I’ve also been doing, since I know my colleagues, they will have a bunch of question, and this makes it easier for me to redirect them directly to this page 😉
- I installed VirtualBox on my home server. Thank you Roger for recommending this lightweight hosted hypervisor. Check him out over at http://jensoroger.wordpress.com/.
- Downloaded the entire appliance for VirtualBox – OVA
- Imported the ova file into VirtualBox.
After about 30 seconds, I kid you not. You have a Home Assistant. I then accessed my Ubiquiti – UniFi Cloud Key Controller to see what local IP the VM had received. Copied that and added port “:8123” to it in a web browser to access the UI Configuration. Then I followed the setup. Once done I quickly found the Add-on Store which I figured out the hey some of these must be essentials to have everything working. I chose to download and install “Samba Share” (Easy Backup Solution) – Do not forget to set a username and password because as of now it comes with a standard one. Also, I chose to install “VS Code” (For Config file editing) – make sure to configure the vs code to turn off SSL “ssl: – false”, if you’re not planning to expose it externally, that is.
I cannot say that I’m a pro in this area, however, I’m learning every day, and I’ll keep you all updated. Thanks for reading. Always appreciated! Till next time!
