4 cool projects you can do with Home Assistant on Raspberry Pi

From NFC movie cards to a washing machine that knows when it's done, Home Assistant gives a Pi plenty to do.

Home Assistant can start innocently enough. Maybe you simply need the bedroom lights to turn off automatically, but that's just a gateway drug. After a while, your washing machine starts texting you and your phone charger becomes a part of your bedtime ritual.

That flexibility is the whole appeal. Home Assistant is a free, open-source smart home platform that can integrate devices and services from different manufacturers and use things like location, power usage, NFC tags or a device changing state to trigger automations. It currently has over 1,500 integrations.

You don't need any of Home Assistant's hardware to get started, either. Home Assistant OS officially supports the Raspberry Pi 4 and Pi 5 , with a minimum of 2GB of RAM and a 32GB microSD card, and it is the recommended installation for most people who bring their own Pi. The software is free, and there is no subscription or feature paywall, though optional services like Home Assistant Cloud cost extra.

When it's up and running, the more interesting question is what you can get your house to do for you.

Streaming is wonderfully convenient until movie night becomes 15 minutes of scrolling. NFC tags offer a slightly nerdier alternative: Give something physical a job again.

Home Assistant can use an NFC tag as an automation trigger. In the simplest version, you can assign individual stickers or cards to albums, playlists, movies or other actions, and then scan one of them with the Home Assistant app on your phone. The automation can be set up through Home Assistant's visual editor, so this doesn't require diving straight into YAML.

It's even more fun with a dedicated NFC reader. Place a card on the reader and Home Assistant can respond instantly, without anyone picking up a phone. It can also tell different readers apart, so the same tag could theoretically trigger different actions depending on which room it's scanned in.