Hello, I want to build a smart home assistant for my project at school, but I haven’t got the hardware yet. Can I start to write my project in home assistant platform until I get the hardware. I just want to play with the platform in order to understand the basics(my knowledge about this project is close to 0)
What do you mean with „write my project in home assistant platform until I get the hardware“?
There‘s not one project to write but instead first install HA to some piece of supported hardware, add the various sensors, switches and devices to the platform (partly add-ons and integrations will be required depending on the vendors you are using) and finally you configure your automations, scripts er al.
(Of course you can start writing some automations in YAML however this all does not make much sense without knowing your entity-ids otherwise you’ll have to revisit everything again later.)
But besides reading the documentation and understanding the concepts there‘s not much you can do. To „play around“ with HA you need it to be installed somewhere.
You can install it using a virtual machine [VM]…
But still you will need some piece of hardware first…
Yes you can. Start with the VM install as suggested by aceindy. Then have a look through the list of integrations for those that don’t require hardware devices (there are a lot):
You can practice installing and configuring these.
Some suggestions:
- A weather service,
- The system monitor.
Then write a couple of automations that generate persistent notifications based on values theses integrations provide. e.g. notify if the weather will be hot/cold tomorrow. Notify if the CPU or memory use is above 50%.
You can also practice creating custom Lovelace dashboards using the entities these integrations provide.
1 Like