Using Home Assistant to Expand Your Home Automations

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Contributors: Alex the Giant
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Introduction

In this tutorial, you'll learn everything you need to know to get started controlling your home with Home Assistant, an open source home automation hub that puts local control and privacy first, running off of a Raspberry Pi. In this tutorial we'll cover how to set up Home Assistant, and regardless of whether you created the devices yourself or purchased off the shelf IoT devices, get them working together in harmony.

While this guide walks you through the setup of Home Assistant, this is not a tutorial about how to get the most out of Home Assistant (but a quick Google search for Home Assistant tutorials will provide you with endless links to do so).

Home Assistant Logo

Image courtesy of home-assistant.io

Required Materials

To follow along with the examples in this tutorial, you will need the following pieces of hardware. You may not need everything though depending on what you have. Add it to your cart, read through the guide, and adjust the cart as necessary.

Optional Materials

Depending on your setup, you may also need the following.

Raspberry Pi LCD - 7" Touchscreen

Raspberry Pi LCD - 7" Touchscreen

LCD-13733
$60.00
54
Multimedia Wireless Keyboard

Multimedia Wireless Keyboard

WIG-14271
$29.95 $19.95
4

microSD Card with Adapter - 16GB (Class 10)

COM-13833
6 Retired

LCD Touchscreen HAT for Raspberry Pi - TFT 3.5in. (480x320)

LCD-14776
2 Retired

Suggested Reading

If you aren't familiar with the following concepts, we recommend checking out these tutorials before continuing.

Raspberry Pi 3 Starter Kit Hookup Guide

Guide for getting going with the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B and Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ starter kit.

How to Use Remote Desktop on the Raspberry Pi with VNC

Use RealVNC to connect to your Raspberry Pi to control the graphical desktop remotely across the network.

Introduction to MQTT

An introduction to MQTT, one of the main communication protocols used with the Internet of Things (IoT).

ESP32 Thing Plus Hookup Guide

Hookup guide for the ESP32 Thing Plus (Micro-B) using the ESP32 WROOM's WiFi/Bluetooth system-on-chip in Arduino.