Ok, so I have been running in loops to get my Home Assistant setup the way I want and I thought it would be easier to just ask for help.
I have a pi 3 and want to run Home Assistant and Google Assistant on it as well as directly use the GPIOs. HassIO cannot do it as Google Assistant wont run or is pretty hard to configure. Hasbian I installed onto a card and I cannot seem to get a desktop environment, so I’m not sure if that is the way it is made or Im missing something. I managed to install Home Assistant and Google Assistant onto a Raspbian desktop with autostart and everything but Home Assistant seems to be way crippled vs the HassIO version, for ex., there is not configurator, samba share options, discovery does not work although its enabled and I pretty much got no way to setup or add devices. Is this the way its supposed to be or am I missing something? I dont want to waste a Pi just to host a webpage like what the HassIO has. Please help.
There is no desktop environment for hassbian it is designed to run headless. To interface with it you need to SSH in via another computer.
Hassio is another means of installing Home Assistant. It runs docker on top of a custom OS called HassOS. You gain the ease of the add-ons but lose the flexibility of other install methods. HassOS also does not have a desktop, it is designed to run headless.
Discovery works the same on all home assistant install methods. However it doesn’t work for all devices. See the component page for details.
For samba share, here are some instructions I have as a cheat sheet to set it up on hassbian, rasbian, or most Debian based Linux installs. Be sure to customize the file path to the share to that of your config directory.
HomeAssistant currently is configured through adding components via the configuration file. You can navigate to the files via your Rasbian desktop install or edit on another machine via the samba share.
You likely will want to dedicate your Pi to your home assistant setup. It needs to run 24/7/365.
Just to emphasize, you can do anything with a standard installation of HA that you can with hassio, but you have to do much of it manually. In answer to your question in the title, here are the instructions to set up configurator https://www.home-assistant.io/docs/ecosystem/hass-configurator/
You install samba the same way you would on any other linux computer.
This is one exact answer I wanted to know that Haspbian is headless. Nowhere on the internet it mentions this fact. Thank you for that. If then, how is it different from HassIO since both run standalone and HassIO is 150mb and Hasbian is 450mb with less features?
Complexity of the install does not matter to me, I just want everything to work how I was wishing for. So far I have tried all the 3 variants of HA. I will look into the discovery component, but as far as I know my discovery is enabled in yaml file and it worked well when I tried Home Assistant a couple months ago on my Pi but now does not discover anything on all 3 installs.
Thank you for all the links and help, much appreciated!
Hassbian is Raspbian with Home Assistant pre-installed in a python virtual environment with systemd already configured.
HASSIO is basically a configuration consisting of multiple Docker containers that get downloaded and installed on first boot (which winds up being much larger than 150MB). 2 completely different base OSes, with 2 completely different goals, but both run Home Assistant.
I wouldn’t say that hassbian has LESS features. Hassbian allows you to have complete and utter control of the host OS and use it for more than home assistant. You can install a multitude of applications outside of home assistant. Compare that to hassio where you are literally limited to running hassio and its add-ons.
The functionality that addons provide are readily available to you if you want to do the work yourself.
Addons are just preconfigured docker containers. It’s that simple. They actually have nothing to do with home assistant. You install and configure the functionality you want at the OS level and tie it in yourself.
Thank you all very much. This seems to be a very responsive and helpful community. I get the idea now, I will do the research and find out how to make it happen. Thank you again
I am also trying to manually install addons such as configurator to be able to edit my yaml files via a browser editor without the use of the addon store because I am using my raspberry pi 4 b 4gb with ubuntu full version and used DockStarter to quickly load multiple docker container images, including Home Assistant, (not HASS.io). I have other docker containers running samba and node red. My Problem is that I don’t know how to integrate those other container apps into home assisant. I can access other apps by typing the port that the app uses after the ip for the raspberry py, but it’s separate. Can these containers comunicate with eachother? also, specifically in the case for configurator - there was no docker image that I could find for it, and the link to the instructions for the manual method was a dead link. I keep seeing that it is possible to get the same result for any addon manually, but what is this manual method? I have yet to see any instruction on the manual method. Please help. I might be forced to switch to hass.io if I can’t find out how to manually install addons, but I would lose my biggest hope in all of this. My main goal later is to use TensorFlow machine learning computer vision to add person detection and facial recognition as triggers for mqtt states into home assistant. For now though - configurator - manual method - please .
At least for the configurator you can look at this Wiki on how it can be installed without it being an addon. But as you might have guessed, it won’t show up within the HA UI, so you’ll still need to link to it yourself.
