Home Assistant is a free Open Source home automation software that was born in the United States in 2013 and in 2018, the company Nabu Casa was founded by the founders of Home Assistant with the commercialisation of different products to use this solution.
Official Nabu Casa products for using Home Assistant
Although Home Assistant is a home automation software that you can install on any support such as a Raspberry PI, NUC, Docker, Virtual Machine and much more, Nabu Casa proposes the Home Assistant Green and Home Assistant Yellow home automation hubs to make your life easier.
Skyconnect is another product from the US company, a USB Zigbee dongle that allows you to implement this Zigbee technology with Home Assistant.
Home Assistant Tutorials
On Pluyu, you will frequently discover different contents about Home Assistant.
How to integrate an Onvif camera with Home Assistant
Home Assistant Green : the official Home Automation Hub of Nabu Casa
How to install and configure Zigbee2MQTT in Home Assistant
Why use Home Assistant?
It is one of the most comprehensive solutions in the world.
Although it is true that it is not easy to use Home Assistant if you are starting from scratch in home automation, it is worth getting information about this software as it will allow you to have the greatest freedom of customisation when you want to carry out your smart home project.
For example, if you use the Home Assistant Green home automation hub, Skyconnect dongle and Zigbee2MQTT, you can buy Zigbee smart light bulbs from Ikea, Zigbee smart plugs from Lidl, Zigbee presence sensors from Sonoff, Zigbee smart thermostat from Schneider Electric, temperature sensors from Aqara, Zigbee smart modules from NodOn…. and much more (of course, checking that each Zigbee device you want to buy appears on the compatibility list at zigbee2mqtt.io) and you can put it all together with Home Assistant.
And that’s when the magical experience of the smart home begins as you can create different automations where each smart device will have its own use.
For example, you can decide to programme that shortly before you wake up, the blinds are opened, the heating is set to comfort mode, the coffee machine is switched on, the lights are switched on at 30% of their intensity and your favourite songs are played.
As you can have most of the smart devices in Home Assistant, you can configure everything from the Home Assistant interface.
Frequently asked questions
What is Home Assistant for?
Home Assistant is a home automation software that allows you to control your smart home by being compatible with different smart devices, home automation technologies, voice assistants and much more.
What to do with Home Assistant?
With Home Assistant, you can do anything. An interesting example is to buy a compatible Zigbee dongle like Skyconnect created by Nabu Casa, company of the founders of Home Assistant and add different Zigbee compatible devices like Zigbee light bulbs, Zigbee sensors, Zigbee plugs and much more.
This way, you have control of different aspects of your home, from the Home Assistant interface, from anywhere in the world.
You can link your Amazon Alexa and Google Home voice assistants with Home Assistant to have voice control of your devices (such as opening or closing your blinds by voice, turning lights on or off by voice and more).
And you can create different automations for your smart devices to operate according to defined criteria such as automatically watering your garden every day based on conditions measured by soil moisture sensors, adjusting the heating according to presence and absence schedules and much more according to your imagination.
How to get started with Home Assistant?
You have different options to get started with Home Assistant such as installing this free software on a Raspberry PI. But nowadays, there is also an interesting option which is to use the Home Assistant Green home automation hub that comes with the Home Assistant software pre-installed.
How to install Home Assistant?
You can install Home Assistant on different media such as: Raspberry PI, NUC, Nas Synology, Computer, Docker, Khadas VIM, Nas Terramastar, Virtual Machine.
But if you don’t want to complicate your life, you can buy the Home Assistant Green hub which comes with the Home Assistant software pre-installed.