Home Assistant Guidelines

Hardware

Raspberry Pi 3B+
External HDD
ESP82XX-base chipset
FTDI Serial-to-USB (required to flash ESP8266)

Install Raspbian on Pi

To preserve the SD card, use an external HDD.
Need to have a hard drive with a dedicated power supply or that spins up disks before the Pi boot sequence (see https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/pi-3-booting-part-i-usb-mass-storage-boot/).

Prepare HDD Drive

Download image: https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/
Write image to HDD with Etcher: https://www.balena.io/etcher/
Update config.txt if needed: https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/config-txt/
Add wpa_supplicant.conf and ssh if needed: https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/wireless/headless.md

File `wpa_supplicant.conf`

Create a file wpa_supplicant.conf in the /boot directory.

network={
    ssid="wifi ssid"
    psk="wifi password"
}

https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/wireless/wireless-cli.md

File `ssh`

Create an empty file ssh in the /boot directory.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/remote-access/ssh/README.md#3-enable-ssh-on-a-headless-raspberry-pi-add-file-to-sd-card-on-another-machine

Boot the Pi

Do not need a SD card, the 3B+ will boot automatically on HDD.

Setup the Pi

Setup the raspberry (hostname, timezone, ...)

sudo raspi-config

Upgrade the Pi

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Install Docker

With the great install script:

curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com | sudo bash

Install hass.io

https://github.com/home-assistant/hassio-installer

Before install, need to install required dependencies.

sudo apt-get install jq avahi-daemon dbus apparmor-utils network-manager

Install hass.io providing the Raspberry Pi 3 platform : raspberrypi3

curl -sL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/home-assistant/hassio-installer/master/hassio_install.sh | sudo bash -s -- -m raspberrypi3

Access HA

HA should be started and reachable at http://<ip_of_raspberry>:8123
Hass.io should be present on the left menu.

Go further

hass.io the Docker platform for HA
Home Assistant the open source automation system
Monitoring Raspberry and Docker containers
Node-RED flow programming for IoT
Sonoff Basic Hardware dig-in
Tasmota the open source ESP8266 firmware

TODO

InfluxDB integration
Lovelace view includes

1300371/homeassistant