If you’re into home automation and open source, then you’re probably at least familiar with Home Assistant, the Python-based open-source home automation platform. This lets you get started with your smart home using something as simple as a Raspberry Pi. This can be easily managed with Hass.io, an all-in-one solution to run Home Assistant. Thought technically distinct, it’s hard to separate the two projects.
The team behind the projects recently announced some major updates will becoming to Hass.io. The big one is that they will be changing the core OS behind the project. All previous releases were based on a fork of ResinOS, which was designed to be a barebones Linux distro to run Docker on embedded devices. You can see the attraction for a project that needs to run on a Raspberry Pi. But it turns out changes with ResinIO have made the fork labor intensive to update, and requires a lot of work to add new hardware. So the team to turning to another embedded Linux option, Buildroot.
Other changes include automation add-on configuration, and a change in protocol to manage hosts. Luckily users will be able to update their OS builds without losing any of their configuration. Hopefully these changes will allow the Home Assistant ecosystem to grow even faster.
Pascal Vizeli comments:
We’ve introduced Hass.io last July. Since then, we’ve noticed some room for improvements in making Hass.io easier to use, lighter to maintain and easier to integrate with other host systems.
Read more at: Hass.io 2018
