Home Assistant

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So Home Assistant is a free platform for automating your home.

You did hear 'free' right?

Like most free things, the cost is in learning how to make use of it.  

But you are here reading this, so you have the benefit of someone else who has already done some initial work and is sharing it.  The absolute best way to reward me is to simply let me know that I helped you out.

So I followed these directions: https://www.home-assistant.io/getting-started/

Specifically, the part where you set up a Raspberry Pi.  The directions suggest a 

and you can try that, but I used my Raspberry Pi 3B.  It seems to have worked well.

Just a note here - the linked pages may change.  If they do, let me know and I will try to update these directions.

I followed https://www.home-assistant.io/getting-started/#software-requirements where it says

  • Download and extract the Home Assistant image for your device.

Well my device is a Raspberry Pi3B, so I followed the link, and downloaded https://github.com/home-assistant/operating-system/releases/download/4.16/hassos_rpi3-4.16.img.gz which I got from the page https://www.home-assistant.io/hassio/installation/.

Most Raspberry Pi Devices are 32 bit.  If you are unsure what you have, and the device boots, take a look here: https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=251721#:~:text=If%20you're%20running%20Raspbian,then%20it%20is%2032%20bit.

I downloaded balenaetcher to my laptop and 'burned' the above downloaded image onto the microsd card for the raspberry pi.

Rather than deal with the issues I might encounter with using the wifi, I plugged an ethernet cable into the Pi.

I plugged the zwave usb dongle into the Pi, put the microSD card into the Pi, hooked up the power supply, and waited about 20 minutes for the software to update.

Then I opened up a browser on my laptop and went to http://homeassistant.local:8123. It worked!

I created the account as directed in the https://www.home-assistant.io/getting-started/onboarding/ page. 

Remember your username and password!  If you forget it you will need to start over by re-flashing the Raspberry Pi.

It recognized the zwave dongle during this process.  I chose to configure it during onboarding.  I used the recommended path '/dev/ttyACM0', which worked properly.  You can read about how to configure it after onboarding here - https://www.home-assistant.io/docs/z-wave/installation

So the computer and the 'dongle' were set up.  Now I just needed to get the lock set up, so I had something to talk to,



 

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