I’m about to build my first home assistant and am fairly new to the game. I just discovered balena and notice they have their own os and documentation on how to run home assistant. The question is;
I don’t wan’t to run a system thats dependend on a cloud service and i can’t find out if the balenaCloud is purely for the deployment of your code etc, or if it’s also vital for the home assistant to communicate with other devices. My go to option was going to be using Zigbee. Could someone please clarify this for me as balena is fairly new and there isn’t a lot of documentation.
balenaCloud offers more than just deployment of code. It also allows you to connect to your device remotely through a VPN via the Internet, builds your code into docker images that are deployed to your devices, and many more features. We aim to make it really easy for IoT fleet owners to push their code into devices deployed in the field and to manage these devices remotely.
If you want to use balenaOS but don’t want to rely on a cloud provider, you may also use the self-hosted version of balenaCloud which is openbalena. You may see more info about it and how it compares to balenaCloud when you visit the link below:
Home Assistant does not need balenaCloud or balenaOS to connect with other devices on your network so you can also set it up on your own. They also have images ready that you can use for your devices. You can refer to their documentation in their website to help you set up using the following link: