New Raspberry PI Installation

Hi All,

I have been lurking around the Home Assistant website for some time. I currently have a Wink Hub 2 and around 25 connected Zigbee bulbs and 2 Z-Wave plugs. I have been frustrated by the lag in using the Wink Android app so I am considering trying home assistant.

I already own a Raspberry Pi running Raspbian Stretch. I have this setup us an Open VPN server & NAS. If I remove the micro SD card and use a different one for Home Assistant will I be able to go back to my existing setup just by replacing the micro SD card? It took me a while to get this setup working so I do not want to mess it up lol. This Pi is currently on my network and I use VNC Viewer on a networked PC to logon to the GUI and manage it.

I know I will need a USB Zigbee adapter to communicate with all my lights, can anyone recommend a decent adapter?

Regards

Richard

Yes, if you pull the SD card and decide HA is not for you, you can just put that SD card back in and boot it and go back to where you were.

That’s Awesome,

Thank you for the quick reply. Will I be able to carry on using VNC viewer or will I need Putty?

Unless you manually install home assistant on top of a version of Rasbian with a desktop UI VNC viewer won’t work. Home Assistant can be run headless so the majority of installs do not have a ‘desktop’ for the backend.

There are a lot of install methods.

Hassio is the most beginner friendly as its is designed to be plug and play. Its not fully there yet and you will need to edit configuration files. Hassio has add-ons (configurator / samba) that provide access to those files so you can edit them without using something like putty. Hassio is built on a custom operating system so you can use any of the typical linux commands you are used to in the terminal and google searching for solutions won’t be much help either.

Hassbian has a bit more flexibility and is basically rasbian stretch with some scripts that run on first boot to install home assistant and some other services. It has the most flexibility and you can install other software like you would on top of rasbian.

You can of course install on top of Rasbian manually and have a desktop if you want. However, this is a waste of resources on the limited Pi hardware, the desktop is really not needed.

Thank you,

I just downloaded the latest version of Hassbian and have imaged a spare micro sd card. I will give it a try a little later. I am quite excited about what you can do with HA and looking forward to tinkering.