The Beginner's Guide To a Smart Home: How to Start Automating your Home with Home Assistant
This article is your starting point to automate your home exactly as you wish.
There are many ways how you can build a smart home. You can use solutions ready out-of-the-box for all devices, such as Loxone, or make it yourself. I decided to make it independently to have better control over that and not sell my kidneys to pay for the out-of-the-box solution.
In this article, I will provide a high-level description of my Home Assistant setup that can give you some introduction to how to set this up and the possibilities.
Home Assistant
It's a system that enables you to integrate any device that is at least a bit smart. This system can run on a dedicated PC (must be turned on all the time), a small PC such as Intel NUC, or even a smaller device such as Raspberry Pi 4.
Raspberry Pi is cheap and is entirely sufficient to run Home Assistant. It was a clear choice for me. There is also an excellent step-by-step installation guide for it.
