We have chosen the step by step tutorial of setting up a smart home as the best learning option. In this guide you will find how our model house looks like, how rooms are labeled and what we will control in our model house. If you learn to set up a model house, it will be easy for you to adjust the number of lights and their labels so that the setting fits your real project. Let's go!

The heart of the PiHome automation si open source platform Home Assistant or OpenHAB. We will prepare a docker manager Casa OS for easy installation of the home automation software, together with other critical tools as MQTT, Code server and n8n which is essential in modern smarthome.

In this part, we will provide an initial configuration of our prepared docker installation of OpenHAB or Home Assistant. We will provide you how to import basic items (entity) as outputs ligths, sockets and shutters. We will import the inputs as buttons, pir (motion), temperature and humidity sensors.

In this tutorial, we will install Pi-Hole on Casa OS. Pi-Hole helps filter out ads at the network level, meaning it will block ads on all computers, TVs, tablets, and mobile phones connected to our home network. Additionally, it allows us to monitor which sites our devices are communicating with and gives us the option to block social media or disinformation channels for our own benefit.

In this post, we'll install Duplicati, which can regularly back up our PiCloud/PiNAS/PiWork or PiHome either to an external USB drive, locally over the network, or to the cloud.