Home Automation with Home Assistant

Published 2019-04-26

What is it?

Home Assistant is an open source home automation platform. Conceptually it is a central platform that can communicate with smart home devices (such as lights, motion detectors, alarm systems, thermostats and much more).

For people familiar with smart home devices, the most annoying problem with them is every manufacturer has a different app to control their devices. Since I have Wemo switches, TP Link switches and Hue lights, I need to constantly switch between the 3 apps to control my home.

Home Assistant solves this problem by acting as a central platform to control all your smart devices through, which makes a big difference in the usability of smart house devices.

Home Assistant can be installed on a Raspberry PI or any other lightweight server that supports Python 3.

My Use Case

I wanted to use Home Assistant to allow me to control my existing smart devices through a single, uniform interface.

Hosting

Home Assistant can run pretty well on a Rasberry Pi, however I have an old Windows laptop that is perfect for the job.

Device Configuration

TP Link Switches

I found that the TP Link switches disconnect randomly, this can be fixed by doing the following:

Assign a fixed IP address for the switch using address reservation on the router (Google "Address reservation" + your router name), take note of the IP address you assign.
Restart the switch
Manually configure the TP Link setting in Home Assistant, see here for an example

Assigning a static IP address seems to make the TP Link switches more reliable

Belkin Wemo

My Wemo switch was immediately automatically discovered by Home Assistant and works flawlessly.

Windows Notes

Installation

Install Python 3 and then run the following in PowerShell

pip install homeassistant

Some Home Assistant plugins require the Visual Studio c++ tools to compile them, here is a link to installing that on Windows.

Running

Its best to run Home Assistant as a service, as that way it will restart automatically and start when the computer boots. However for testing purposes it can be ran using the following PowerShell command

python -m homeassistant

Running as a service

I came across a few things that simplied the installation for Windows.

Running Home Assistant as a service

This is handy for restarting Home Assistant if it crashes, make sure to look at the recovery settings in the Services program after the service is created.

When creating the service, point the service to the python executable at C:\python3X\python.exe and add the additional arguments, below is what mine looks like

C:\python37\python.exe -m homeassistant -c C:\<path_to_home_assistant_config>

Future Improvements

Setup Splunk to log metrics