The Beginner's Guide To a Smart Home: How to Start Automating your Home with Home Assistant

This article is your starting point to automate your home exactly as you wish.

Ondrej Svoboda
8 min readFeb 13, 2023
I'm presenting you with the mighty Home Assistant—photo courtesy of the author.

There are many ways how you can build a smart home. You can use solutions ready out-of-the-box for all devices, such as Loxone, or make it yourself. I decided to make it independently to have better control over that and not sell my kidneys to pay for the out-of-the-box solution.

In this article, I will provide a high-level description of my Home Assistant setup that can give you some introduction to how to set this up and the possibilities.

Home Assistant

It's a system that enables you to integrate any device that is at least a bit smart. This system can run on a dedicated PC (must be turned on all the time), a small PC such as Intel NUC, or even a smaller device such as Raspberry Pi 4.

Raspberry Pi product photo from raspberrypi.com

Raspberry Pi is cheap and is entirely sufficient to run Home Assistant. It was a clear choice for me. There is also an excellent step-by-step installation guide for it.

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Ondrej Svoboda
Ondrej Svoboda

Written by Ondrej Svoboda

Smart home enthusiast, Team leader in IT, Technophile, Proud parent, Improv practitioner, Latent filmmaker and magician, Multipotentialite