The brand-new Home Assistant Yellow box had been collecting dust in my “gadgets to install” cardboard box for four months, with me randomly sighing and proclaiming to my husband, “We should set up Home Assistant one of these days.” Weeks came and went until one day, he took a deep breath and replied, “You know what? It’s today.” I almost gasped. We got out the laptop, the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 we’d bought, a screwdriver, the Home Assistant Yellow unit, and a USB stick and proceeded to install Home Assistant on Home Assistant Yellow.
Did I lose you with that last bit? If I did, then boy, oh boy, are you as unprepared as I was when I delved into this wonderful nerdy world. Nearly everything about Home Assistant is a certified struggle. Nothing is straightforward. None of it is made for surface-level geeks like me, who have dabbled with Google Home, Alexa, and Apple Home for years. No, Home Assistant lives on its own nerdy planet, lightyears away from everything else; it’s a world where everything is possible, but nothing is easily achieved.