Running Home Assistant on Pine64

Posted on in General

This is a dump of me setting up Home Assistant on a Pine64 board I have. I am used to OpenHAB and have created bindings for it so this should be a new challenge and a way to see how well it works. The reason I am heading towards Home Assistant is the components it support fit some of my needs better. Also time to get to know python better :)

  1. Get DietPi, I am using DietPi_v127_PineA64-arm64-(Jessie) for this so over time some of the items may change, if you know what you are doing you should be good. It can be found at http://dietpi.com/
  2. Write it to a SD card and boot the Pine64 up with the card in the SD slot.
  3. Find it on the network! I just looked at the DHCP logs for my router. It I hard wired into the network so easy to find.
  4. Use a SSH client(Kitty) to connect to it, it will prompt you a few times and update. I will assume you can handle this, eventually you will connect to the Pine64 and have a system ready to go. Login details: username = root password = dietpi Things you should do.
    • Change the root password.
    • Update the firmware as needed.
    • Install Samba or FTP server is you want to edit remotely.
  5. User setup, I like to create a user for my own use. So being creative I shall call it fred! Make sure you add it to the sudo group to run admin commands. sudo adduser fred sudo adduser fred sudo
  6. Install python 3: sudo apt-get install python3 python3-pip
  7. Install Home Assistant pip3 install homeassistant
  8. Start Home Assistant: hass