Parts 1 and 2 covered the motivation and system design for the remote station. This post will cover the configuration of the Raspberry Pi System Control Computer.
High level view
The following operating system services will be installed:
- Docker to host Home Assistant and its Addons
- Home Assistant Google Drive Backup to store the regular HA backups in the cloud
- Influxdb to capture the historical record of system events and sensor readings
- MariaDB to store the log files
- Mosquitto Broker to act as the message broker for HA
- Node-Red to deliver the control dashboard
- Studio Code Server to edit the various configuration files
- system_sensors to read various sensors like CPU temperature and usage and feed them to HA using MQTT
Home Assistant
Home Assistant is implemented as a series of Docker containers. The recommendation is to either install it on Home Assistant OS or as a single Docker container.
Using Home Assistant OS provides a fully supported environment and you can use Home Assistant itself to install the various addons; whereas if you install Home Assistant on its own, you need to manually install and manage the other addon containers.
However there is another partially supported installation route, and that is to run the Home Assistant Supervised Installer on Debian 11: Note: not Raspbian. Given that I wanted to install other services, and I have the experience needed, I have chosen the Supervised Installer route.
In addition to the addons, I also need to install several Home Assistant Integrations the main one being: the Tapo Controller so I can control the mains switches.
Node-Red Dashboard
I’ll cover this later as I haven’t really given it any great thought yet. However, in principle there will be a single page with two groups of objects: the first displaying various sensors and the second with the various controls that are needed – such as switching on the mains power to the radio.
