{"id":713,"date":"2018-01-23T11:33:15","date_gmt":"2018-01-23T19:33:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ismellsmoke.net\/\/?p=713"},"modified":"2018-01-23T11:41:18","modified_gmt":"2018-01-23T19:41:18","slug":"home-automation-hacking-part-iii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ismellsmoke.net\/?p=713","title":{"rendered":"Home Automation Hacking Part-III"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is Part-III of an ongoing series of Ol’e Sopwith’s<\/em> adventures with a home automation project. Part-1<\/a>\u00a0started off with the ambitious idea of doing a bake-off between openHAB<\/em> and Home Assistant<\/em>. In Part-II, I learned the openHAB<\/em> platform and achieved all of my goals of getting numerous Z-Wave devices on-line. I even took the time to create a detailed openHAB “How-To” to assist those of you that are new to the platform. Very happy with the results.<\/p>\n

Here in Part-III, my plan was to do the same with Home Assistant.\u00a0<\/em>Dig into the bits and document how it works. My hope was to get all of my Z-Wave devices behaving the same way in Home Assistant (HA)<\/em> as they were in openHAB.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Not so fast Shirley. From the moment I started to learn HA<\/em>, I ran into problems. For example, I started on this page, “Install Home Assistant”<\/a>, and followed the instructions exactly. I burned the image and booted the Pi. Notice the below instructions 6-8.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. …<\/li>\n
  2. Connect your Raspberry Pi to the power supply so it turns on.<\/li>\n
  3. The Raspberry Pi will now boot up, connect to the Internet and download the latest version of Home Assistant. This will take about 20 minutes.<\/li>\n
  4. Home Assistant will be available at\u00a0http:\/\/hassio.local:8123.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    What happened next was weird. I had a KVM connected to my Pi and a wired Ethernet connection to the Internet. The Pi did boot and showed a white background with the blue\u00a0HA <\/em>logo in the middle of the screen. After a few minutes, the screen went black. No keyboard activity bought the machine to life. <Alt><2> did not give me a new console. The Pi was dead. I was expecting to see a console with the install progress that would take about 20 minutes. Nothing.<\/p>\n

    At this point, I figured I screwed up burning the image. So, I re-burned the image and got the same result. I headed to Google and found out many others were complaining about the same thing.<\/p>\n

    Then I found a post that explained the Hass.io<\/em> image for the Raspberry Pi was a self-contained Docker container. When you boot the image, it immediately fires up a web browser. What you are supposed to do is boot the Pi, then open a browser and head over to\u00a0\u00a0http:\/\/hassio.local:8123. When I did this the second time around, I saw a white browser page and a banner that said “This will take about 20 minutes.” Aha- the install occurs in a browser!<\/p>\n

    The Pi3 installed the bits pretty quicky and the system came up. The first thing I wanted to do was ssh to the Pi and set up the locale, timezone, keyboard, etc. Uh-Oh. SSH did not work. Huh? More Googling to discover the Hass.io<\/em> docker image is completely locked down. You cannot install software on it, or do anything else with it. Black Box. at this point Sopwith<\/em> is not liking the HA<\/em> universe right now.<\/p>\n

    I next discovered that HA<\/em> does have a Raspian<\/em> version for the Pi named Hassbian.\u00a0<\/em>Terrific. But wait! On this HA<\/em> web page<\/a>, it says:<\/p>\n

    “Hassbian is our customized operating system for the Raspberry Pi 3. It is the easiest way of installing Home Assistant.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    If this is so, why do the instructions on the main install page tell you to install Hass.io<\/em>? Weird.<\/p>\n

    I burned Hassbian<\/em> to an SD card and fired it up. Now this had all the workings of a typical Raspian<\/em> type install. I got everything configured and then discovered, to my chagrin, there are a lot of missing pieces in the Hassbian<\/em> release that are in the Hass.io<\/em> container. So guys, what am I supposed to use? Please don’t leave me hanging here!<\/p>\n

    I decided to go back to the Hass.io<\/em> container and build my system from there. As you will find out, this was just the beginning of my trouble.<\/p>\n

    I spent the next two days literally going insane with this platform. In order to keep this Blog entry to a reasonable length, I will just highlight my unbelievable frustrations.<\/p>\n