Step Two - Home Assistant on your Raspberry Pi 5
💡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
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.
📝Instructions
These instructions have been summarised from home-assistant.io. Please refer to the official instructions for more detail as this page is only a summary.
Requirements
You will need the following to install the Home Assistant Operating System on the Raspberry Pi 5:
- Your Raspberry Pi 5, with power supply and case
- A Micro SD card that is 'Application class 2' for increased performance. You should make sure the capacity of the card is at least 32GB.
- An SD card reader
Installation Steps
- Download the Raspberry Pi Imager software from here
- Open the Raspberry Pi Imager software and select your Raspberry Pi device
- Select Choose OS
- Select Other specific-purpose OS > Home assistants and home automation > Home Assistant
- Choose the Home Assistant OS that matches your hardware, e.g., RPi 5 (choose the latest, probably a 15.x version)
- Insert the SD card into your computer and select it (note, the contents of this SD card will be deleted)
- Write the installer onto the SD card
- Once completed, eject the SD card
- Insert the SD card into your Raspberry Pi
- Plug in an ethernet cable between the Raspberry Pi and your network router/switch
- Connect power to start up the device
- 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.
ℹ️Next step
When you have installed Home Assistant on your device (or to see what comes next), proceed to Step 3.