If you hit a wall, the Home Assistant subreddit, forum, and Discord are good places to look for troubleshooting tips. Once Home Assistant is running, add to it as many of the devices and services in your home (termed "Integrations" in Home Assistant) as you want accessible from your phones or speakers. Basically, Home Assistant can live on any little computer that can always be on. Start with Home Assistant's official guide to get the system running on a Pi, a NUC, a NAS, an always-on system, a Docker container, or in a virtual machine. It's outside our scope here to walk you through that process, but there are many resources you can consult.
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Getting your home in orderĮnlarge / Home Assistant setup, pre-organization.įirst, you'll want to get Home Assistant up and running and connected to your devices.
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It's more limited in scope than Home Assistant, but that might be a plus for some folks. One more note before heading deeper: if you only use Apple devices to control your smart home devices, you only care about HomeKit compatibility, and you have a spare Raspberry Pi, HomeBridge is another solution.
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It can also connect Google and Amazon's apps and assistants to the rare devices they don't support, though that costs $5 per month (but also supports Home Assistant's development). Let's dig into how Home Assistant can help HomeKit find every device in your home, even the devices it doesn't officially support, for free. Or you can switch between both for more control or easier access. But you can also use it as a gateway between a motley collection of non-HomeKit-friendly gadgets and Apple's Home system.
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Sure, you can use it to cut the big tech companies out of your smart home and design your own dashboard. But I also want to save my partner from learning how an entirely different, somewhat fiddly app works to access lights and switches.Ĭonveniently, Home Assistant isn't an all-or-nothing proposition. Yes, Home Assistant has its own app, plus a mobile-friendly website.
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Further Reading How to achieve smart home nirvana (or, home automation without subscription)īut sometimes, I just want to change the thermostat from the lock screen on my iPhone or tell Siri, on my phone or watch, to turn on a lamp.