How to install Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi

Why Home Assistant

I chose to use Home Assistant as the brains behind my smart home system for a number of reasons.

It’s lower in cost than a lot of commercial systems. I had for example looked at Homey which is £399 in the UK (as of 14/04/23).

I’m a huge fan of open source, particularly when it comes to Smart Home items, many of which are produced in China, which tends to have a bad rep with privacy and security.

Lastly, Home Assistant is incredibly flexible. No matter what you are looking to automate, you’ll be able to do it in Home Assistant without being tied to a particular brand.

Items Required

• Raspberry Pi (this guide uses a ).
• Micro SD card
• Software to flash OS image to an SD card – Balena Etcher

Steps to install Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi 4

WRITE THE IMAGE TO YOUR SD CARD

1. Insert the SD card into your PC
2. Download and run Balena Etcher
3. Click the “Flash from URL” button
4. Copy and paste this URL:
   https://github.com/home-assistant/operating-system/releases/download/9.5/haos_rpi4-64-9.5.img.xz
5. Click the “OK” button
6. When Balena Etcher has finished downloading the image, click the “Select target” button
7. Select the SD card you want to flash the image to
8. Click the “Flash!” button to start writing the image
9. Balena Etcher will notify you once the flash is complete

Boot HOme assistant on your raspberry pi

1. Insert the SD card into your Raspberry Pi
2. Connect an Ethernet cable to your Raspberry Pi
3. Turn your Raspberry Pi on
4. Wait a few minutes and then on a device on the same network as the Raspberry Pi you should be able to reach Home Assistant via
   http://homeassistant:8123 or http://X.X.X.X:8123 (replace X.X.X.X with your Raspberry Pi’s IP address).