Hello all, its a long story but in brief i have almost zero knowledge of computers and wanted to be able to control my home airco,s from afar. Ended up at home assistant as i thought why not connect the rest of my smart devices in one place. Had trouble setting up from the start. After bungling along endlessly i am not able to connect the two new aircos to the home assistant on my smart phone. Decided to try and set homeassistant u on my home laptop thinking that might help. I have windows 11 on the laptop. Any tutorial i try to follow differs or doesn’t work with what actually happens on my laptop. Does anyone have advice or a link to a tutorial that is compatible with my Windows 11 system. Thanks in advance.
Thanks francisp, this was one of the first i tried. In the video he clicks on the first option Virtualbox and i get something different to what he gets in the tutorial. I try again.
Home assistant requires a always-on, always-at-home computer to act as a server, it cannot be run just on a phone. While many users use old laptops as their servers, Home Assistant should not be run on a laptop that you take outside of the home.
I have purchased the homeassistant green box. That is now connected to my wifi. Does this count as an always on server?
The Home Assistant Green is a server… but it does not have WiFi, it’s a wired ethernet connection.
I have managed to put virtual box on my laptop, and again the YouTube tutorial i was using goes and does things that don’t correspond with whats happening on my end.
Sorry yes it is connected with a cable. With the app on my phone i can connect with it and see the dashboard. It connected automatically to my sonos speaker,tv and p1 meter. I just cant seem to get the new aircos on there. I added mqtt but am stuck there. Im intermittently trying for about 3 weeks now. I’m so deep in i cant see the forest for the trees. Lol grr and a small teardrop.
If you have the Green up and running, there is nothing to do on your laptop except use the browser.
There are third party client apps, like HASS Agent you can use, but they are not required.
What aircos do you have ? Do they have a HA integration. If you have a green, there is no need to use virtualbox on a PC.
Mitsubishi, i don’t know about the ha integration. I purchased the wifi connectors from the internet knowing i had to use homeassistant to use when away from home. I received instructions to do this and only get half way through before i get stuck. In the instructions i had to add on mqtt to homeassistant, add a new user and assign them to the new user. I dont know if this matters but i can type in the ip address of both aircos and control them from my phone but only when im home. I assume because we are both on my WiFi network.
I decided to try on the laptop because during the setup of the aircos on the wifi i had difficulty and contacted the guy. He was helpful and also stumped. He advised to try with the laptop and then we could successfully connect them to the wifi.
Use the browser? What does this mean? I have been trying for hours to find/connect to HA.
Update! Use the browser!! Thanks Didgeridrew! Didn’t work at first but after some help in the troubleshooting section on the website im in. Now lets see if i can get these aircos integrated.