I have been using smartthings for years, but want to try home assistant. I was always interested in having a floorplan dashboard for controlling my smart devices and it looks like floorplans for home assistant are available.
My first question is just to get started. I have an old Raspberry pi 3 B. However, the last time I was trying to use it for something, it was very slow to operate. Also, I am much more familiar with windows and my computer runs smoothly. Can I install home assistant and set up floorplans and smart devices and everything on my windows PC; then transfer it simply to the raspberry pi 3 so that it continuously runs there?
I wouldn’t recommend using a Raspberry Pi 3B, personally. You might be better off getting a low cost computer from somewhere like Wal-Mart or maybe a local PC repair shop and installing Home Assistant OS on that instead. Or ordering a Raspberry Pi 4B from Amazon or someplace.
My end result is planned to run the floorplan dashboard on a tablet (maybe amazon firetab). Does the home assistant actually run on the tablet or is it on the raspberry pi and you just “access” your home assistant to display on the tablet? Sorry I am obviously just wanted to know a little of what im getting in to (in simple terms) and I dont really know how this is going to work yet.
Yes, the home assistant instance will run on your raspberry pi, PC or whatever computer you decide to run it on. Then you access the interface via either the app or a browser in your tablet, phone or PC.
I started on a Raspberry Pi Zero just to test the waters ti see if I liked it. It ran, but was unbearably slow to the point it was nearly unusable. But it worked well enough to decide I wanted to use it, and I ordered a Home Assistant Blue and haven’t had any regrets since. If you have an unused Pi, it should run, although you might experience the same lags as I did on a model 3.
Not long after I got the Blue, Home assistant Yellow (Amber at that time) was announced and I ordered that too and eagerly awaited its release for a year and a half. Finally got it running last week.