The below is a mixture of feedback and questions as the setup has confused me and must confuse many others. As a background i am a relatively savvy IT individual so I am surprised that this has caused me so many issues. Also i appreciate this is open source and i am writing this to assist in its development.
Prior to setup i wanted to create a touchscreen dashboard in the “hallway” where users could control everything in the house in one place.
I assumed i would download the software / os onto a raspberry pi and then be able to run everything including GUI on that. What confused me for a long while (and confuses many others based on googling) is that the rasp pi is not how you access the dashboard (i thought my rasp pi was not working as it was on the Home assistant screen and i thought i needed to get to the browser on the rasp pi) and this must be done on a separate device browser. (presumably container allows this but it really isn’t clear). - Is there a way this can be made more clear in the setup info?
Questions:
Does the rasp pi require leaving on all the time to run the os?
Isnt this a bit of overkill to use a device just for this and could a pi zero not be able to handle this?
Would i need a monitor on the rasp pi if it is just running the HA os?
What else do people use the raspberry pi for when running HA os?
Thanks all and hope this helps to show where a lot of new users must be struggling as i have read a lot of other emails where they say HA setup has failed but it hasnt and is because of this…
Kinda surprised that people would be confused by that, I think it’s petty clear. It’s a client/server architecture and the system running HA is the server. You don’t view web pages on a webserver directly either. You use a client to connect to it. It’s a perfectly well established concept that is the basis of the entire internet and cloud infrastructure. I don’t think it needs further clarifications, to be honest.
Maybe i am a muppet and should have thought of this. I guess my thought process was not that i was creating a server but just an app / dashboard (i know this sounds basic).
Currently / previously for any smart devices in the house i have download an app to my phone which allows me to connect any smart devices and control them from there in a gui. There is no need for a dedicated device to run the operating system. Understood that there may be a lot more under the hood but i thought it was the same principle. Sorry i know that i am not seeing this correctly…
Previously you download an app to the phone and can start control your devices, that is because there’s a server (or servers) in the cloud somewhere, which is subject to internet availability and the willingness of the device vendor(s) to keep running servers in the cloud in the foreseeably future.
With HA, that concept still applies. The difference is that with HA you can take the control back from the vendor(s), and run that servers locally inside your house, in a RPi or VM or repurposed laptop or some home server. There was a recent blog post about this.
So yes, the HA server would be always on.
Now to the “client” side, you can use a browser from any PC/laptop (see demo), you can use the HA app available on both iOS and Android, and if you want, you can even build your own community based dashboards… and not using the official one nor official app.
So back to your initial requirement - a touchscreen dashboard in the hallway… many people have done this also. Yes you can build a RPi with touchscreen and fullscreen browser to connect to your HA server, and you could also repurpose a tablet to do so… there is even “kiosk browser” to make things more configurable. I have also seen wild projects using a projector + voice control to replace touchscreen.
Just to add, HA has a native web interface which works just as well on a mobile device as on a PC or laptop.
Most people are almost always closer to their cell phones than any kiosk screen you may put in the hallway. Just add a link to your HA system on your home screen. No app necessary.
Finally, I’m finding my old RPi 3B+ to be more than enough to run HA. That would change if I did a lot of video, audio, text to speech, or other processor-intensive functions. Just monitoring and controlling smart devices, no problem.
Essentially you thought you downloaded an app while ha is a complete ecosystem for smart home.
When I first installed it on a Raspberry Pi4 I regret it, I was wondering why I need all this, I was doing the same and easier with apps (one thousand) and no dedicated hw.
But shortly after I falled in love with home assistant! I moved all my devices into it and out from their apps. Home assistant is so flebile that you can do stuff impossibile for other systems.
I created several automations and a 3D map of my house that allow me to control everything from a cool interface on a wall mounted tablet.