I can’t believe I have not written up my Home Assistant setup. Perhaps that is a good thing as I needed to become comfortable with the setup and how to use it. I’ve been using it for nearly a year at this point. What prompted me to do a writeup now is I’m setting up another one for my mom so I can control some things remotely and to help her manage some things around the house.
My current installation was on a Raspberry Pi 4 setup to boot from a USB drive. This has been working well, but I’m setting up a Raspberry Pi 5 for mom’s installation with a NVMe SSD drive as the boot device.
Bill of Materials for this project
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- Raspberry Pi 5 – 8 GB
- Raspberry Pi 27W USB-C Power Supply (Black)
- ElectroCookie PCIe to M.2 NVMe SSD HAT Board for Raspberry Pi 5 – Supports Key-M 2230 & 2242 SSD Sizes (ECR5_SSDS) – NOTE: The included cable did not work! I could not get a 3cm cable to work. Use a longer cable.
- Geekworm 16Pin 0.5mm Pitch PCIe FFC Ribbon Cable Set 30mm/50mm/80mm for Raspberry Pi 5 & PCIe to NVMe SSD Adapter
- ElectroCookie 256GB NVMe SSD for Raspberry Pi 5 – SK OEM BC901 (2242 Size, PCIe Gen4 x4)
- GeeekPi Aluminum Case for Raspberry Pi 5, with PWM Fan and Copper Heatsinks, Supports Official Active Cooler, PCIe Peripheral Board Compatible
Installation Steps
- The first step is fitting the NVMe hat to the Raspberry Pi 5. I have found that the 3cm cable that came with my hat did not work properly. I purchased a set of cables to swap out and found that the 3cm cable in the new set had the same issue. I tried the longer 5cm cable and the hat worked well. I would have thought that a shorter cable would be better but I suspect that there is an impedance or timing mismatch with the shorter cable.
- Write the image to the NVMe drive using the steps outlined at https://www.martinrowan.co.uk/2024/02/installing-home-assistant-on-raspberry-pi-5-nvme-storage/.
- Once my Raspberry Pi rebooted, it was running Home Assistant.
- I opened a browser window and navigated to http://homeassistant.local:8123/. It took a couple of minutes before Home Assistant fully loaded.
- Click on the “Create my smart home” button.
- Create a user by enter the information and clicking the “Create account” button.
- Set the home location. You may try using your address. If that does not work, use the latitude and longitude. Once entered, click the “Next” button.
- Select information that you are willing to share with the Home Assistant team and click the “Next” button.
- Click the “Finish” button on the devices screen.
Home Assistant is now setup and ready to be configured.
2 replies on “Home Assistant on Raspberry Pi”
I’m still looking for the Magic solution that allows me to avoid having my family switch from Alexa or have to use Home Assistant for some tasks. It’s already a pain in the butt working with WLED as a separate app since Alexa decided it didn’t want to see it any longer. I’ve been automating my home with lights and sensors and hubs, and cameras, etc. for at least 10 years and I’ve got a huge mix of communication standards and specialized wifi apps.
Are you in an exclusive Home Assistant environment? A hybrid environment? How are you managing the continual vomiting of new capabilities, proprietary apps, emerging standards, and silo’d solutions without making all of your non-techie friends and family crazy cause they don’t know how to fix things that go wrong when you’re away?
I’ve been able to integrate most things into Home Assistant so I only need to use Home Assistant. I still have separate apps for things but have not needed to use them. I’ve really liked using Home Assistant for everything but it is not for the fait of heart to get setup and configured. I was waiting before setting this up for mom, but it has been stable enough that I think it is fine to remotely manage it. We shall see.