Building a Portable Home Assistant unit

Share your Projects!
1

I Run Primarily Z wave components including my Locks and garage door openers.
as anybody that runs Zwave knows that in order to use the locks and certain Garage door openers they need to be paired using the secured method this is fine if within a close distance from the hub
now the AEON Labs ZW090 Z-Stick Gen5 US pairs close to your devices without being plugged in as it has a internal battery, But it does not do secure pairing unless connected to your computer and the Home assistant is running so you can select secure pairing in the GUI.

portableHA
portableHA4000Ă—3000 1.6 MB

(Warning if you are using the AEON labs stick remember to use a external powered USB HUB with it since it will not play nice with PI4.

This unit it can also plug into your Battery pack USB HUB keeping it portable.

well since my locks are not anywhere close to my hubs location secure pairing becomes problematic at best and straight up won’t do it at worst,
I have found only two options on getting secure pairing to be successful either

  1. bring the devices to the hub for pairing “typically means take stuff apart”.
    or
  2. take the hub to the devices which is a typically headless unit thus can get rather cumbersome with all the bits that has to go along to make it happen.

Well this little project builds a portable Home assistant hub that I can pair all my devices including the secure ones,

I found a little case that is for the PI 4 and it has a little touchscreen on it along with a portable battery pack I now have a unit I can plug my Z stick in and walk around to pair all my devices when I feel the need to redo my Zwave stuff because of what ever the reason may be.

List of parts

  1. Your Zwave Stick that you use on your main hub.
  2. A Raspberry pi 4.
  3. A decent Battery Pack like this one Anker Powercore.
  4. this Neat little Case Screen with Case.
  5. Memory Card Sandisk

Also extra stuff for the initial install of the Raspberry Pi as the touch screen does not work out of the box and raspberry has SSH disabled by default now you can install the ssh file to enable it when it first loads then you have to hunt down the IP and all that happy stuff or if you have a USB keyboard and mouse and a monitor like a HDMI one that you have access to then I recommend this cable if you don’t already have the means to connect the raspberry pi

HDMI cable for pi4 to monitor

Once you have all the bits gathered then we can move forward

  1. Assemble the PI and case as instructed in the instructions
  2. Load the SD card with raspberry pi OS
  3. Connect keyboard mouse and monitor to PI and plug in your SD card
  4. Power up the PI and let it do its thing and get up dates and enable the SSH
  5. Make note of the IP addressed assigned to it and then when it is ready for restart then power down.
  6. Disconnect monitor as its not needed. leave keyboard and mouse connected at this time for logging in to Home assistant the first time.
  7. power up unit and SSH into it with PuTTY.

Getting the touch screen operational.

  1. Make sure you have internet access for the PI.
  2. While in SSH in the pi install this below
sudo rm -rf LCD-show

git clone https://github.com/Lcdwiki/LCD-show.git

chmod -R 755 LCD-show

cd LCD-show

sudo ./MHS35-show

The unit will reboot and I betting that nothing came up on the screen after some searching I found this fix so if you are still looking at a blank screen then perform this next step.
if you have a working screen then skip this next step, no need to fix it if it isn’t broke

sudo rpi-update e1050e94821a70b2e4c72b318d6c6c968552e9a2 -Y

Now it will want a reboot I recommend a full shutdown and disconnect and reconnect the power supply

once it boots back up you should be seeing the little desktop on the screen congrats if you made it.

we now have the basis for a portable Home assistant unit ready to load up
I recommend this instruction for loading it up as it has touch screen abilities in the instruction

  1. Installing Home Assistant

2.Come back here once Home Assistant is running

  1. if you used my tutorial to install your main Home Assistant then you know you have File sharing to the Home Assistant folder that means you can copy you files back and forth with ease highly recommend Backing up your configuration as it is easy to break

  2. I would recommend setting home assistant on your main computer that you intend to use for Home assistant. without the Z stick installed then copy all the files over to the portable unit with home assistant stopped.

  3. install the Zstick and restart the portable unit and it should come up with your configuration

  4. setup the Zwave configuration as you would on any device and go around and pair up your devices

1 Like