As brain for my homeaustomation I have chosen Home Assistant. My main reason for chosing Home Assistant is that it is super easy to install on a Raspberry pi. There are basically four options:

1. hass.io - the docker image variant
2. hassbian - the preinstalled raspbian installation
3. Raspberry Pi All-In-One - the all in one installation script to get started quickly
4. Manual - manual install everything

After trying all options, I finally went for the manual installation. Mainly because I had problems getting the fritz component working in the other options.

My Setup

This section describes which components I use, what problems I had with them and how I solved them. My configuration is not yet available, but I intend to put it on GitHub.

Pi Light

In order to control my lights, I use PiLight and KaKu switches. Setting this up is straightforward using the component documentation. The only problem I still have is that when PiLight is configured with a port, it is no longer possible to use pilight-send and pilight-receive.

Fritz!Box

Fritz!Box is the router I use for my internet. Home Assistent has support for device tracking via the fritz component. In order to get this component working, some dependencies. I had several problems installing lxml in the python virtual environment:

• “Error when installing lxml because of dist_wheel” - Not sure what the problem was, but I had this problem in all standard installation options, except the manual installation.
• “Not enough memory” when installing lxml - Fixed by assigning less memory to the gpu as described here.