My initial dive into Home Assistant

Well I decided to try Home Assistant after the many headaches I encountered getting openHab working on my QNAP NAS (ARM based TS 219P). I don't think I can put all the blame on openHab as many of my issues were related to trying to get my aging NAS hardware to behave. Regardless, I am now considering going down the path of having a single board computer (SBC) for my home automation needs. I currently like the oDroid XU4, seems much higher performance than any of the Raspberry Pies. And I would like the additional performance headroom for future tasks I have in mind.

To get myself familiar with Home Assistant I followed this great guide, which introduced me to the lightweight DietPi image for SBCs. I grabbed the VirtualBox VM and followed the guide, and for the most part it just worked.

One of the issues I encountered was the Home Assistant service coming up before the network was fully up. This led me down the path of learning about systemd. I would highly recommend this tutorial.

My current goal for this VM installation is to get to the point of automating my porch lights based on sunrise/sunset times. Once that is working for a while, I think I would be willing to order the oDroid and go further.