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Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

pragprog.com

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Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#2
An upcoming project of mine is to setup magic mirror: https://magicmirror.builders/

Then start moving my other stuff onto the rpi as well like pihole for example.

I wonder if RPI has a zigbee module or similar for automation. It doesn't seem like it? Anyone ever find anything like that?

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#3

An upcoming project of mine is to setup magic mirror: https://magicmirror.builders/ Then start moving my other stuff onto the rpi as well like pihole for example. I wonder if RPI has a zigbee module or similar for automation. It doesn't seem like it? Anyone ever find anything like that?

Jeff has it covered (It's coming soon): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJFsZL5CTgM

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#5
Home Assistant[1] is the best approach I've found for this. It's pretty amazing but has a pretty steep learning curve (although they're getting better and better at this). The real power of HA is the rich integration ecosystem[2], the Community Store[3], and that it runs locally (more reliable and much faster for things like motion sensors, etc).

It expresses everything from every integration as an entity in various device classes so as long as some random tech is supported by an integration you can group them seamlessly. For example - I have Z-wave based motion detectors but I can control Hue lights and Wemo switches for motion detection - but only if I'm home as reported by the zone feature in their iOS companion application.

Their supervisor/docker based install for Raspberry Pi is pretty slick[4]. Write an image to disk as you usually would and you get a bare-bones OS with Home Assistant running in docker. Then there are additional docker-based add-ons you can install for stuff like MQTT, Z-Wave, Let's Encrypt, SSH access, nginx, and more. All managed in the web ui. Pretty cool.

[1] https://www.home-assistant.io/

[2] https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/

[3] https://hacs.xyz/

[4] https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/raspberrypi

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#6

Home Assistant[1] is the best approach I've found for this. It's pretty amazing but has a pretty steep learning curve (although they're getting better and better at this). The real power of HA is the rich integration ecosystem[2], the Community Store[3], and that it runs locally (more reliable and much faster for things like motion sensors, etc). It expresses everything from every integration as an entity in various…

I spend my last weekend setting up Home Assistant using VMWare on my spare machine. To say that it has been very rewarding is understatement. I am completely blown away by the possibilities that it enables. For instance, I have all my unsupported devices magically supported in HomeKit via the HomeKit Bridge integration in HA.

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#7
I have to ask others, have people had good luck with this?

I have tried to do this multiple times, with multiple models of Pi and every time after 6ish months it just seems to completely stop working. I can't get it to boot even off of a new sd card.

Am I doing something wrong or does the hardware really not want to be run consistently in this manner?

I have since decided to just run some home automation VM's on my media server which has worked flawlessly (minus networking being weird sometimes).

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#8

An upcoming project of mine is to setup magic mirror: https://magicmirror.builders/ Then start moving my other stuff onto the rpi as well like pihole for example. I wonder if RPI has a zigbee module or similar for automation. It doesn't seem like it? Anyone ever find anything like that?

I have the ARP1600 board which has an xbee slot plus a bunch of other useful stuff.

https://www.waveshare.com/arpi600.htm

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#9

Home Assistant[1] is the best approach I've found for this. It's pretty amazing but has a pretty steep learning curve (although they're getting better and better at this). The real power of HA is the rich integration ecosystem[2], the Community Store[3], and that it runs locally (more reliable and much faster for things like motion sensors, etc). It expresses everything from every integration as an entity in various…

I'm aiming to use a supervised installation to free up the pi for other tasks, but concerned about performance. Will be booting from SATA to help to this end, and to avoid degradation from writing to microSD often (this may be the case when I start recording security footage)

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#10

An upcoming project of mine is to setup magic mirror: https://magicmirror.builders/ Then start moving my other stuff onto the rpi as well like pihole for example. I wonder if RPI has a zigbee module or similar for automation. It doesn't seem like it? Anyone ever find anything like that?

You can use a USB module, or wifi-zigbee bridge devices from vendors like Sonoff are also supported.
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