Revisiting the Pi on Pi Day with Home Assistant

March 14th is Pi Day. 

But Pi has a special meaning in my Smart Home.  The raspberry pi was the first piece of hardware I bought to run Home Assistant.  This awesome little 35 dollar piece of equipment ran all of my home automation for about 3 years before I eventually graduated up to Docker and my current repurposed laptop.  I say graduated since it was an evolution of the house and the IOT in it that made me seek out more processing power to run everything.  My system now has around 200 smart sensors and countless devices and it just overwhelmed the Pi and it’s modest processing.  It was (and still is) the easiest way to get into Home Automation though.

I also have a Pi Zero that runs my DHCP and DNS for my internal network.  The Pi Zero came from Jacques Bensimon for just a buck at a Long Island Micro Center.  Best ROI ever. Although not powerful enough to run Home Assistant, it is the perfect vehicle for Pi Hole – a whole house ad blocking system.  Curious how it preforms? Check out @BearStoneHA which tweets out live stats on all of the internet traffic blocked each day. (See here)

I spent some time fixing the Pi Hole sensors in my #Lovelace setup as well.

We also show off the LED scene which celebrates Pi Day by setting the front lights to RGB 3,14,159.

Happy Pi Day!

3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751058209749445923 0781640628620899862803482534211706798214808651328230664709384460 9550582231725359408128481117450284102701938521105559644622948954 9303819644288109756659334461284756482337867831652712019091456485… and on and on.

– Carlo