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Home Assistant

Available since: version 25.10

Home Assistant is a home automation hub with emphasis on local control and privacy. It integrates with thousands of devices including smart bulbs, alarms, presence sensors, door bells, thermostats, irrigation timers, energy monitors, etc.

Please note that Home Assistant is installed and run inside a container provided by the Home Assistant project. Security, quality, privacy and legal reviews are done by the upstream project and not by Debian/FreedomBox. Updates are performed following an independent cycle.

Home Assistant app is considered experimental in FreedomBox as it is fairly new to our ecosystem. You may face issues working with it or the app may undergo major breaking changes.

Hardware

Home Assistant can detect, configure, and use various devices on the local network. For example, if a device is connected using Wi-Fi or LAN to the same network as FreedomBox, Home Assistant can detect, configure, and use the device. Other home automation protocols such as Thread, ZigBee, and Z-Wave are also supported but require additional hardware to be connected to your FreedomBox. For example, if you have a door sensor that speaks ZigBee, you need to attach a ZigBee USB dongle to your FreedomBox. Home Assistant can then detect and use the door sensor on the ZigBee network. Note: if you attach any such hardware to FreedomBox after you install the Home Assistant app, then you need to disable and re-enable the Home Assistant app before the hardware can be discovered and used by Home Assistant.

Home Assistant is a comprehensive solution for your home automation needs supporting thousands of devices. You can check whether a device is supported by Home Assistant by visiting the integrations page. Other devices which are not listed may also be supported when they are similar to supported devices. It is recommended that you purchase hardware that advertises support for Home Assistant.

Many home automation devices connect to or send data to their manufacturers' servers. This can be a serious violation of your home's privacy. These devices may also stop working when their manufacturer goes bankrupt, decides to close the product line, or forces you to purchase newer models. It is strongly recommended that you purchase hardware that works locally with a home automation hub (in this case Home Assistant) without connecting to manufacturer's servers. These are listed under the categories "Local Push" or "Local Polling" in the Home Assistant's integrations page.

Need for Subdomain

Unlike most other apps in FreedomBox which work on a path like https://mydomain.example/app, Home Assistant requires a separate dedicated subdomain such as https://homeassistant.mydomain.example. Before configuring the Home Assistant app, you must create a subdomain using System -> Name Services. See the documentation for Name Services to understand how you can acquire a subdomain.

Setup

After the app is installed, Home Assistant web interface must be setup. An administrator account is created at this time. Home Assistant maintains its own user accounts separate from user accounts created on FreedomBox.

When new USB dongles are added to make Home Assistant talk to devices on networks like Thread, ZigBee, and Z-Wave, then setup operation must be re-run on the app. This operation is available in the Extras menu drop down with gears icon in the Home Assistant app page. Setup must also be re-run when the hardware is removed. Otherwise, Home Assistant service will fail to start.

Usage

Home Assistant provides a fully functional web application and a mobile application. Simply login and start using:

Advanced Manual Configuration

If you wish to perform your own customization to Home Assistant setup, feel free to edit Home Assistant configuration files manually. Configuration, scenes, automations, scripts, secrets, database, and log files are all stored in the directory /var/lib/home-assistant-freedombox/config directory. You will need to disable and re-enable the app after configuration changes for them to take effect. Note that when FreedomBox itself modifies these files, it will not preserve comments and other formatting.

External links

• Website: https://www.home-assistant.io/

• Source code for Home Assistant: https://github.com/home-assistant/core

• Source code for Home Assistant container image: https://github.com/home-assistant/docker

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