How

Ok, I'm in! How do I start?

There are many ways to run your home automation system depending on budget and experience. Focusing on Home Assistant, which is the platform I use at my place, I’d give you two options to start.

If you start from zero, you’re excited by this new adventure about home automation but you’re scared by having to do manual work to assemble the hardware needed and install all the software then Home Assistant Green is perfect for you. Let’s see why:

• it’s affordable: at $99 recommended price you have a good starting point and a minor loss if you find yourself not using it after some time (at that point you’ll easily find someone looking for one and sell it);

• it’s plug-and-play as it comes ready to use;

• comes with Home Assistant already installed, you really just need to power it and connect it to your home network.

If you're more tech-savvy and want to have more control on the hardware you use then I’d suggest you to go with a Raspberry Pi 4 (or 5 by the time you read this) with 8GB of RAM. Why?

• it’s affordable: ~$90 new but you can find used ones for less (there are tons of RPi unused, ask some friends);

• very low power device: and that’s great considering it will stay on 24/7;

• reusable: even if you’ll discontinue your home automation journey you could still use it for other projects (Network-wide Ad Blocking with Pi-hole maybe?).

Then with Raspberry Pi Imager you’ll easily write the Home Assistant Operating System (HAOS) image to an SD card to use on the Raspberry and will be ready to start.

Want more resources because you want to have Docker on this machine and run other services along the home automation? Well I guess you know already enough and are able to find the solution alone :)