I tried to install it on a raspi 4 with touchscreen for my wife. The raspi worked fine with Debian, esp. it's installer asks for the wifi and ssh keys, and therefore you can trivially connect to it.
Not so with the homeassistant installer. No wifi setup, no ssh access at all. You really need to cable it, nmap the new IP, and then I got stuck because the web server doesn't show up. Attaching the keyboard brought me into a restricted ha> prompt, where I cannot fix anything.
I did this a few months ago for a test home assistant setup and had the opposite experience. I forget exactly what I did, but it involved editing a file with the wifi settings and dropping my public ssh key on the SD card before installation.
If you use ethernet, no editing required. Web interface goes into setup mode automatically.
Worth noting that ha cli[0] (ha>) does have a `network` command to configure this as well.
Mind that you should not use a Pi with SD card for HA. I'm not sure what the official stance is, but: In my peer group failing SD cards were responsible for a vast majority of issues. Causes are probably a mixture of heavy logging and power outages; either from the grid, or user error not shutting down the Pi before disconnecting power.
At our house I run HAOS in a VM (on a beefy server). My wife uses the app on her phone (as do I), and we have a cheap tablet with the app for guests. On the laptops/desktops we also have access to the web UI.
As the article points out, remote access for the phones can be done via the commercial offering or a VPN (as in our case: wireguard on the OpnSense).
Wholly depends on how much stuff you’ve got. I’ve started having issues with the Linux io scheduler when the auto backups got large (1G+), the thing just hung and needed a power cycle.
Also what SD card you have, the durability between different models differ a lot. The SD card I use for my dashcam been working for years (A "SanDisk MAX ENDURANCE" card), some other cheaper SD cards can stop working properly after just months if you're using them for write-heavy stuff.
Anecdotal agree, but I only use it for my lights (about 20 smart bulbs + 5 sensors + 4 remotes) and I never tinker with it. At least 4 years later, that little Raspberry Pi 3 + ZigBee dongle + sdcard are kinda forgotten about.
Interesting; my Raspberry Pi 3B+ + Zwave dongle + SDcard eventually got too slow (to the point that HAOS updates would fail). Switched it to an old ChromeBox and it's been no problems since.
Much respect to Home Assistant for making everything as accessible as it is, but it’s inherently a complex project. It also has to deal with trying to be everything to everyone, which makes it hard to identify the easy path through setting it up among all of the options.
There are two ways to get through Home Assistant:
1. Identify the easy path instructions, get equipment that matches perfectly, and follow the instructions to the letter. Use only equipment known to have great integration. Upgrade only when necessary. Change nothing as soon as it’s all working.
2. Be willing to spend a lot of time tinkering and debugging. There’s a big Home Assistant channel in one of the big Slacks I’m in where everyone eventually hits something that takes days or weeks to figure out.
Many companies have tried to package or use Home Assistant as the foundation for plug and play IoT hubs, but they all seem to end up with the same realization that it really needs a capable and willing human in the loop as soon as you deviate even slightly from the list of devices with excellent support. This isn’t even entirely Home Assistant’s fault: Most of these devices were never designed for third party control.
I’d suggest that you use a docker instance. The setup is trivial.
Not having HAAS has made little difference to me being able to do all sorts of stuff - and HACS gives you access to a whole bunch of additional stuff, and works in docker.
If you type "login" at the ha> prompt, you'll get a root shell.
This is something I also had to accept about HA. It runs in a VM in my case so it worked out-of-the-box, but you don't just ssh to it after installing it, and the ha> prompt is just a bit different. So far, it hasn't been in the way, although it occasionally takes time to find out how to do things.
It's very flexible though, and apart from devices in your house there are many outside sources of data to use, like weather data, sun elevation or trash pickup dates. The HA app on your phone gives you many sensors usable in a flow.
The time spent on it usually results in something worthy of that time, in my experience.
Not so with the homeassistant installer. No wifi setup, no ssh access at all. You really need to cable it, nmap the new IP, and then I got stuck because the web server doesn't show up. Attaching the keyboard brought me into a restricted ha> prompt, where I cannot fix anything.
So far it's horrible