Newbie needs an overview of HA / hass.io

Installation
1

I am trying to work up the best way to go in setting up my HA system.

What I can’t find anywhere in the documentation or forums is a top level description of what fits where. Are there any wiki pages or high level overviews of the whole project.

I’ve read as much as I can from the guides on this site, but I only get a very short desription before it moves on to how to install.

I’ve got 2 model 3 raspberry pis, one with the official 7 inch touch screen, and another with a pimoroni hyperpixel touch screen.

I’m wanting to connect up some lights and temp/humidity sensors that are home made using arduino pro mini boards, but as yet not connected to anything wireless or otherwise. Ideally I’d like to add nrf24L01+ modules to these light controllers and sensors. Ideally I’d connect another rf24 module onto one of the rasp-pis and have this send commands to the light controllers and receive data from the sensors.

What I can’t quite find out is if I can run both the backend and the frontend on the same rasp-pi, or do I need to one for the backend and one for the frontend.
Does the official rasp pi touch screen work with the frontend, and has anyone used the pimoroni hyperpixel.
Can the backend work with a rf24 module (either directly or via a piece of python code).
I would also want to connect up a 433Mhz transmitter either directly attached or via an intermediate arduino pro mini. This may be used to tinker with controlling our boiler (it uses a 433Mhz remote thermostat for which I’ve found a webpage about hacking into it).

I’ve seen a user in the forums offering ready made USB dongles for both rf24 and 433Mhz, and would be quite happy to use that route, but I’ve got more than enough electronics experience to feel confident enough to connect directly to the rasp pi headers. I’ve got some ready made breadboardss with rasp pi headers on them, for this very purpose.

I know this is not a hardware question, but where does the MQTT server fit in. Is it required to operate the backend, or is it only needed for keeping history?

If there’s anywhere else I should look or forums I should post in, then please say so.

Thanks

2

HA can be run on various hardware platforms which is why there is no specific reference about how / what fit where. Since you are using a RPi for teh server I suggest using USB dongles for zigbee / z-wave / RF and then anything else will just connect to your existing wifi

HA runs headless so you will need to run the secont RPi for the interface (there are ways around this but lets keep it simple for now).

You can (but dont have to) run an MQTT server on the same device as HA. You only need an MQTT server if you want to communicate with devices that use this protocol, it’s not necessary otherwise.

1 Like
3

Many Thanks Dave.

Thats helped me to get started.