Configure Home Assistant

At this stage you have your Raspberry Pi and the SD card installed with Home Assistant.

From many questions I see online I think this part confuses some people. You will not be using a GUI or even command line directly on the Raspberry Pi to configure Home Assistant. Instead you will do everything over the network via a web interface.

The initial connection will require you to have the Raspberry Pi physically connected to your your router/switch with a network cable.

Once connected power on your Raspberry Pi. You may have to wait some time before it becomes available to use on your network. Once it is available you should be able to access it in a browser by going to http://homeassistant.local:8123/

If that doesn’t work, you can check your router/switch and identify a new device and use the IP address instead of “homeassistant.local”

On the first connection you will be prompted to CREATE MY SMART HOME PAGE.

Your first task will be to create a User.

Next you will be prompted for your Home Location. Setting this accurately can help with certain automations that you might wish to create. For example, turning on an item only if you are at home.

The next option will allow you to share usage information to help improve Home Assistant. It is completely optional and will depend your comfort level with sharing back information even if it is anonymised.

When you click Next you will see that Home Assistant has already been hard at work checking for devices on your network.

You will now be presented with the home screen. A sight that you will become very familiar with as you use it more and more.

We will enable the advanced configuration which will expose more control over the system. For example, on number helpers, by default only a slider input will be available, where in most of our configurations we will want to manually enter a number rather than try to use a slider.

Click on your username in the lower left.