Home Assistant

The Nervous System

Home Assistant is the centerpiece of my automation setup. It talks to everything: my Zigbee network via Zigbee2MQTT, my custom hardware via Mosquitto MQTT, and my phone.

Implementation

I run the container version (not supervised) because I want full control over the host OS and networking.

services:
  homeassistant:
    image: ghcr.io/home-assistant/home-assistant:stable
    container_name: homeassistant
    restart: unless-stopped
    volumes:
      - ./config:/config
      - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
    network_mode: host # Required for some discovery features
    # Note: Traefik routing still works if mapped correctly

Key Integrations

1. Zigbee2MQTT: All my sensors (temperature, motion, door) are Z-Wave/Zigbee and they talk to HA via MQTT.
2. Custom IO: I've built a few ESP32 and Arduino based controllers that report their state directly here.
3. Dashboards: I use the built-in Lovelace UI for most things, but also some custom cards for the energy stats.