Home Assistant on Raspberry Pi Zero W

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I found out about Home Assistant while searching for a solution that would let me control a Broadlink RM Pro locally over the network.



Already having access to a Raspberry Pi Zero W, meant that there was a reasonably low barrier to entry to get Home Assistant running.

After a bit of reading, and given that I already had Rasbian Stretch installed on the Pi Zero W and am reasonably comfortable with Linux, I decided to install Home Assistant in a Python virtual environment (venv).

I also set up Home Assistant to autostart using systemd.

The Pi Zero W is not really recommended for running Home Assistant, and I did run into some issues that may have been caused by low specs of the device. Specifically, I had installation of some pre-requisite packages fail, and some updates failed, which I suspect was due to some activities timing out. Also, the CPU usage would regularly sit on 100% for minutes at a time when trying to check the configuration or restart Home Assistant.

The first thing I tried to do with Home Assistant was get the Broadlink RM Pro to replace some of my universal remote controls, which I'll talk more about here.

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