Hi all, I’m not having a good first experience with Home Assistant.
I am trying to dip my toes into the waters of Home Automation without having to give potential hackers access to control things in my house, so naturally I chose Home Assistant.
I am starting with some Smart Plugs that have Matter support.
So at first I installed HA on my TrueNAS Scale installation, and that worked, but it wouldn’t install the Matter integration. After some research I found out you have to be running the HAOS rather than having it installed in a container.
So I bought a Raspberry Pi 5, and installed HAOS on it. Now it still won’t install the Matter integration.
Following the official Matter setup instructions here: [link removed because I couldn’t post]
When I try to install the integration it gives me the message “Failed to get Matter Server add-on info.”
There is no help in the setup article as to what this even means, but after some googling I found this article: "Failed to get Z-Wave JS add-on info"
Which suggests you have to go to the “add-on store” and install it as an add-on first.
But when I go to the add-ons section (which is currently empty) and then click on to the add-on store, that’s showing up as empty too.
I found this article next: [link removed because I couldn’t post]
This person got asked to check their network settings (mine seem fine, as did theirs). What finally worked for them was using “Restart” under Developer Tools.
I tried this and it didn’t help.
I did some digging and clicking the 3 dots in the add-on store then “Repositories” shows me there are “No Repositories” which doesn’t seem right to me. So, back to google.
I found a Reddit post [link removed because I couldn’t post]
Which directed me here: [link removed because I couldn’t post] which gives instructions to add the repo manually if it’s missing.
That doesn’t work however, it gives me an error message saying “Can’t add GitHub - hassio-addons/repository: Home Assistant Community Add-ons, already in the store”
But it’s definitely not already there. Otherwise it wouldn’t be empty and be saying “no repositories”.
That Reddit poster managed to fix it in the end by running the command “ha supervisor update” inside the terminal of the machine running HAOS. I did this myself on the Pi and it says “No supervisor update available”. Makes sense since it’s a fresh install today.
So I’ve hit a wall. I can’t install the integration without the add-on, and I can’t install the add-on without the repository being added to the store. And I can’t add the repository to the store because it thinks it’s already there.
I am having second thoughts about this whole endeavour (and spending £90 on a new RPi5 kit for something that doesn’t even work on a fresh install).
Is the RPi version of HA not very good? Should I have bought different hardware? Can anyone shed any light on my problems?
Many thanks in advance.
Note: I would have given links to where I found the information online but this forum won’t let me because it says “new users can only post 2 links” … sigh…
---->UPDATE<----
Ok I restarted again but this time rebooted the entire RPi System as opposed to just restarting HAOS.
This time I can finally see item’s in the Add-ons store. However the UI is obscuring all the text. I can’t actually read what anything is. Any ideas?
