Home Assistant on A Raspberry Pi

Posted on 2024-05-30 Edited on 2024-09-29 In Operating System , Raspberry Pi

Again, amazing China. This time, Nanjing. What a city!!!!!

Ancient Qinhuai @ Qinhuai River, Nanjing	Ancient Qinhuai @ Qinhuai River, Nanjing

Raspberry Pi has already well-established a comprehensive community support world wide. Among ALL the operating systems supporting Raspberry Pi, Home Assistant stands out, shining brightly as an open-source home automation operating system in the field of IoT.

1. Overview

1.1 What is Home Assistant?

Home Assistant is the ``open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server.'' (cited from first page of the official website of Home Assistant.)

Home Assistant OS is a minimal operating system optimized for running Home Assistant, and it does not use traditional package management systems like apt. Instead, it relies on Docker containers to manage and run services, including Home Assistant and its add-ons.

1.2 Web UI

After simply flashed Home Assistant OS 12.3 onto a 16GB TF card and insert it into my old Raspberry Pi 3B V1.2, we can now take a brief look at Home Assistant web UI at http://homeassistant.local:8123/.

Home Assistant Overview	Home Assistant Dashboard

2. `ssh` Into Home Assistant OS

2.1 Configuration

2.1.1 Installation of Home Assistant Add-on Terminal & SSH

Please have the add-on Home Assistant Add-on Terminal & SSH installed from Home Assistant -> Settings -> Add-ons.

2.1.2 Edit in YAML

Please do remember to add these 2 lines:

1
2
3

ssh:
  enable: true
  port: 22

at the end of the YAML configuration:

authorized_keys: []
password: []
apks: []
server:
  tcp_forwarding: false
ssh:
  enable: true
  port: 22

2.2 `ssh` Into Home Assistant OS From Remote Desktop

➜  ~ ssh root@192.168.1.83
The authenticity of host '192.168.1.83 (192.168.1.83)' can't be established.
ED25519 key fingerprint is SHA256:MZDkXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXJmxE.
This key is not known by any other names.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no/[fingerprint])? yes
Warning: Permanently added '192.168.1.83' (ED25519) to the list of known hosts.

       ▄██▄           _   _                                    
     ▄██████▄        | | | | ___  _ __ ___   ___               
   ▄████▀▀████▄      | |_| |/ _ \| '_ ` _ \ / _ \              
 ▄█████    █████▄    |  _  | (_) | | | | | |  __/              
▄██████▄  ▄██████▄   |_| |_|\___/|_| |_| |_|\___|          _   
████████  ██▀  ▀██      / \   ___ ___(_)___| |_ __ _ _ __ | |_ 
███▀▀███  ██   ▄██     / _ \ / __/ __| / __| __/ _` | '_ \| __|
██    ██  ▀ ▄█████    / ___ \\__ \__ \ \__ \ || (_| | | | | |_ 
███▄▄ ▀█  ▄███████   /_/   \_\___/___/_|___/\__\__,_|_| |_|\__|
▀█████▄   ███████▀

Welcome to the Home Assistant command line.

System information
  IPv4 addresses for enu1u1: 192.168.1.83/24
  IPv6 addresses for enu1u1: 2001:569:5993:5900:1b4a:e1e6:140c:aac0/64, fe80::ab1f:8f98:b81:a479/64
  IPv4 addresses for wlan0: 
  IPv4 addresses for wlu1u4: 

  OS Version:               Home Assistant OS 12.3
  Home Assistant Core:      2024.5.5

  Home Assistant URL:       http://homeassistant.local:8123
  Observer URL:             http://homeassistant.local:4357
[core-ssh ~]$

3. ESPHome with Home Assistant

One of my very old blogs LVT ESP32-Cam has talked about ESP32 Camera. Today, I found that blog posted 4 years ago before COVID-19, and I’m trying to integrate some of my [ESP32 Cameras] into Home Assistant. Namely, use Home Assistant running on the Raspberry Pi to manage a couple of my ESP32 Cameras.

3.1 ESP32 Boards Management

Please ensure the following 2 boards support have been installed successfully.

3.2 CameraWebServer

Current ESP32 Examples provide an webcam server example: ESP32 Example CameraWebServer. Or, we can simply open up the example from within Arduino IDE: File->Examples->ESP32->Camera->CameraWebServer.

3.2.1 Four ESP32 Cameras

2 Ai Thinker ESP32 Cameras
2 DIY More ESP32 Cameras

Both are compatible with the configuration CAMERA_MODEL_AI_THINKER in ESP32 Example CameraWebServer. Therefore, three places are to be correctly setup:

#define CAMERA_MODEL_AI_THINKER // Has PSRAM
const char *ssid = "XXXXXXXXX";
const char *password = "YYYYYYYYY";

3.2.2 Verify and Upload

3.2.3 Demonstration

However, as you can see, the captured image is not quite stable. And, I did find the WiFi connection is easy to get disconnected. What to do???

[!NOTE:] What to do??? Please continue reading.

3.3 RTSP with MJPEG

As of today, June 4, 2024, there is NO H.264 or H.265 streaming server support. Therefore, I’m going to follow the following 2 blogs and build up RTSP server with MJPEG video streams.