If you’re here, you probably know what Home Assistant is. If not, you can take a look at my previous article about Home Assistant.
Probably the easiest way to start with Home Assistant is with a Raspberry Pi, but instead of using one of these I chose to install it on a different board, an Orange Pi Zero.
Why use an Orange Pi Zero for Home Assistant?
Well, compared to a Raspberry Pi 3, an Orange Pi Zero is a pretty capable board, powerful enough for running Home Assistant in a smaller footprint at a very reasonable price (links below).
The lack of an HDMI port in the Orange Pi Zero is absolutely no problem in this type of application. And the power consumption is slightly lower than on a Raspberry Pi 3.
In this post I will show you how to install Home Assistant in a Python virtual environment on an Orange Pi Zero running Armbian, however, these steps are likely to work on most boards running debian-based systems.
Using a virtual environment will prevent your Python installation and Home Assistant installation from impacting each other.
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