DIY Smart Home Basics EP2 – Home Assistant, Zigbee Controller & Hue Light Bulbs
Hi, and welcome to episode two of my DIY self-hosted smart home series. If you haven’t seen episode one I’ll leave a link in the cards above. I recommend you check out before watching this one as it covers all the terms, technologies and jargon I’ll be spouting here. This episode is all about getting the main system that will control everything up and running, and to connect a couple of these Philips Hue bulbs up as a nice and easy starting point.
First things first, here is what you’ll need: a PC that ideally can be left running 24/7 – most people use a raspberry pi for this, although I’m a tech nerd so I have multiple servers running 24/7 anyway so I’ll be running this in a virtual machine on my UNRAID based system I call OVERKILL – it’s a 60TB NAS with a 24 core AMD Threadripper CPU hence the name.
You will also need a Zigbee dongle – there are a pretty crazy number of options for this, but this SONOFF Zigbee 3.0 dongle comes ready-to-run out of the box, it’s still one of the cheaper options, it looks great with a metal case and has an external, positionable antenna, so I’d personally recommend picking up one of these. I’ll leave a global Amazon affiliate link in the description if you are interested.
Finally you’ll need some devices to connect to it – for this video I’ll be using these Philips Hue White Ambiance bulbs. These are the “old version”, not the ones that exclusively use Bluetooth, these can still use Zigbee to connect to their Hue bridge hub. Of course you’ll need to get the socket type for your fixtures, I’m putting these in freestanding lamps which means I need these E27 bulbs.
So, let’s start the setup process. The first thing we need to do is install Home Assistant, the software that will let us control all of our devices securely and in one place – plus automate almost everything. You’ve got two ways of installing Home Assistant, either as the whole operating system, or as what’s called a Docker Container. Docker is a virtualisation program that lets you run programs in their own little boxes, called Containers, in a secure and virtualized way. That is the more complicated option though, and also opens up the further question of using the “Core” version, or using the Supervisor – the program that lets you easily update Home Assistant and your add-ons, so we are going to take the easy option and use the whole OS.
How you do this will vary depending on the type of device you plan on setting this up on. If it’s a Raspberry Pi, follow the steps in their well written installation guide to download the OS image, burn it to your microSD card, then get it booted up. For me, because I’m running this on my UNRAID server I could use the plugin that runs the “Core” version in a Docker Container but like I said I’d prefer the easier method, so instead I’ll grab the full operating system image made for a virtual machine. That’s under the Linux options, specifically the one listed as “KVM (.qcow2)”. I’ll download that, then transfer it to the isos folder UNRAID creates automatically.
I’ll then head to the VMs tab, and making sure I’ve already plugged in my Zigbee dongle to be able to pass it through to the VM, I’ll click “Add VM”, “Linux”, name it, check autostart, pick at least two CPU cores (although here I’m picking a total of 8 threads because, well, I have 48. Why not.). I picked 4096 MB of initial memory with a maximum of 6144 MB, I left the ‘Machine’ option as Q35 and BIOS as OVMF, I picked the primary vDisk location as my OS image and added a second vDisk as storage, left everything else as-is except for checking the Zigbee dongle to passthrough. It comes up as the USB controller rather than the Zigbee chip itself, but this is the right one. I hit Create and that should be it booting.
In my case, on the Virtual Machines page if I click on the penguin image I get a menu with the option to “VNC Remote”. This pops up a new window with our virtual machine which will be busy setting things up. It’ll take a minute or two, then you’ll get the the ASCII art Home Assistant logo, along with the address you’ll need to go to to finish installation. If your router supports it, you can just go to homeassistant.local:8213, or if you haven’t set that up (like me) then the IPv4 address listed will be for you, which in my case is 192.168.1.190. Make sure to add the :8123 on the end though otherwise it might not connect.
Once you’ve gone to that address, the setup wizard is super simple. You give the system a name, tell it where you are for things like sunrise/sunset times and weather, then it will ask you if you’d like to set up the devices it has found for you. In my case, my Elgato lights, Nanoleaf panels, Ubiquiti cameras and Zigbee dongle were all automatically detected and ready to set up with a single click. I made sure to set up the Zigbee dongle, just by clicking it and hitting “Submit” and after a short wait that was it – I told it what room it was in just for good measure. I also set up the Elgato lights and Nanoleaf panels, all with a single click – save for pressing the button on the Nanoleaf panel controller to allow it to pair.
That’s Home Assistant up and running, and Zigbee configured too. It’s incredibly painless, and I am so, so impressed. Now I’m going to be doing a full video on tweaking and improving Home Assistant, so I’ll leave all of that out for now and we’ll just get these bulbs up and running. Philips Hue bulbs in particular can be a little fussy to get connected to anything other than the Philips hub – specifically if they have already been paired to a hub. If, like me, you just bought them brand new then the setup process is really easy. If not, it still isn’t too bad, basically you just need to factory reset the bulbs which can be done in a couple of ways. If you already have them connected to a Philips Hue Bridge, you can reset them through the app. If not, then you can follow the guide linked in the description to use a feature called TouchLink to reset them – the catch is the bulb has to be within 10cm of your dongle so best to do this either with a lamp you can move or a laptop you can hold.
Assuming your bulbs are factory reset, either by you or because they are brand new, head to “Configuration”, “Devices & Services”, click “Configure” on the Zigbee box, then in the bottom right click “Add Device”. Assuming the lights are powered on, Home Assistant will automatically search for and find the bulbs. You can name them and pick which room they are in – that’s a genuinely useful feature so it’s worth setting that up properly – then that’s it.
The default dashboard, “Overview” will automatically populate with rooms that have devices, so from there you can turn on and off your lights, and because these are the colour temperature changing version, if you click on the name it not only gives you brightness control, but also colour temperature! Just drag the sliders to change it – it might take a few seconds to fully update but once it does it works great!
So that’s it for this episode, next time we’ll be getting a little more advanced with our lighting controls and tweaking Home Assistant to work for us, then we will be moving on to smart central heating which I am very, very excited to have running…
