2Set up “home assistant” on a windows PC

As I’ve writ­ten about before I have a range of “smart home” devices that I’ve been gradu­ally exper­i­ment­ing with. One of the greatest frus­tra­tions of link­ing some of them is that many force you to go via “the cloud” which even with high speed inter­net can lead to delays of mul­tiple seconds for some tasks (“ok google, mute kodi”) for example. I’ve decided to give the free “home assist­ant” a try. As usu­al with any­thing linux based, get­ting it up and run­ning just isn’t straight for­ward. Here’s how…

First, down­load and install the latest ver­sion of python (v3.5+ is required). For con­veni­ence choose the option to add python to the path on the first page of the installer
Next, down­load and install the “Microsoft Visu­al C++ Build Tools” from Microsoft
Next down­load the “home assist­ant” file from Git­Hub as a zip and unzip it into %USERPROFILE%
Open an admin­is­trat­ive com­mand prompt, switch to the folder where you extrac­ted “home assist­ant” and type the fol­low­ing, giv­ing each com­mand time to complete.
pip3 install sqlalchemy
pip3 install netdisco
pip3 install warrant
pip3 install homeassistant
py ‑m home­as­sist­ant –open-ui