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Step Two - Home Assistant on your Intel NUC

💡Home Assistant Green and Yellow owners

If you own and are going to use either a Home Assistant Green or a Home Assistant Yellow device, you can skip this step.

⚠️Difficulty of step

This is by far the most technical step you will have to take to deploy Energy Manager on an Intel NUC. If after reading this you consider it to be too challenging, you should consider purchasing a Home Assistant Green or Yellow device as they come with Home Assistant pre-installed, so this step could be bypassed. If you don't want an official device, you could consider installing on a Raspberry Pi 5. Refer to the Raspberry Pi instructions.

📝Instructions

These instructions have been summarised from home-assistant.io. If you require more details, please refer to the official deployment instructions at Home-Assistant.io.

Requirements

The following are the things that you will need to allow you to install Home Assistant on your Intel NUC (refer to home-assistant.io for instructions for Raspberry Pi 5 deployments - you can just copy the image to your SD card, insert into the Raspberry Pi and boot it):

  • Your Intel NUC device
  • A working network (with internet access). A wired network is generally more reliable than WiFi, but a WiFi connection should also be OK.
  • A USB flash drive that is 8GB or larger in size (this will be wiped so make sure you don't need any data on it - if you do, back it up first as you will lose it)

Installation Steps

ℹ️Ubuntu running location

In the below process, make sure to select Try Ubuntu when prompted as this will run Ubuntu from your USB flash drive (do not select "Install Ubuntu"). We do not want to install Ubuntu on your NUC.

  1. Configure the BIOS of your NUC model (use Del, F1, F2 or F10, depending on your NUC) as follows:
    • Ensure UEFI boot mode is enabled
    • Disable secure boot
  2. Prepare a bootable Ubuntu USB flash drive
    • Download an Ubuntu ISO image from here.
    • Follow the instructions found here to copy the image to your flash drive.
  3. Insert the USB flash drive in your Intel NUC (this assumes you have already plugged in a screen and keyboard).
  4. Turn on your Intel NUC and press F10 (this may vary on your model of Intel NUC, please refer to its manual) to show a boot order. Select your USB flash drive as the booting device.
    • Note, select Try or Install Ubuntu at this stage. You will prompted again latest whether to try or install, and the Try option should be selected then.
  5. Follow the prompts to "try" Ubuntu
  6. Connect your system to your network and ensure that it has internet access.
  7. From Ubuntu, open a browser and download the Home Assistant image.
  8. In Ubuntu, perform the following:
    • Select Show Applications (bottom left circular looking icon)
    • Search for and open Disks
    • In Disks, from the left side, select the disk on the Intel NUC that you are wanting to install Home Assistant on
    • From the top right of the screen, select the 3 dots and select Restore Disk Image...
    • Select the disk image that you downloaded in step 7 above
    • Select Start Restoring, and confirm by selecting Restore
    • You should see the restoration operation in progress
  9. Once the Home Assistant OS has been installed, shut down your Intel NUC and remove the USB flash drive
  10. Once the USB flash drive has been removed from the Intel NUC, power the device back on again. It may take a few minutes but Home Assistant should boot.
  11. From another computer, open a web browser and browse to http://homeassistant.local:8123 - it may take a few minutes on first load, so be patient.

ℹ️Accessing http://homeassistant.local:8123

Usually you should automatically be able to browse to http://homeassistant.local:8123 through mDNS, but in the rare case that you can't, you can browse to it by its IP address (http://x.x.x.x:8123). If this is the case, then you should check your router for the IP address that it has been assigned, or plug in a screen to your Home Assistant and the IP address should be displayed there.

💡Note about obtaining the Home Assistant image

You should check https://github.com/home-assistant/operating-system/releases/ to check for the latest version, especially if the above link no longer works. Always install the latest version of Home Assistant. You should only download the x86-64 version for an Intel NUC.

ℹ️Next step

When you have installed Home Assistant on your device (or to see what comes next), proceed to Step 3.