Home Assistant is an open-source platform for monitoring and controlling connected devices. It runs on a computer the grower owns, speaks to sensors and controls across a wide range of protocols — Bluetooth, Zigbee, LoRa, Modbus, WiFi, MQTT, and dozens more — and everything it records stays the grower's to read, export, and take along. For agriculture, Home Assistant serves as the integration engine that ties greenhouse temperature sensors, irrigation controllers, weather stations, cameras, and automation logic into one system a grower can see, understand, and maintain. In Collect·Have·Use terms it is one strong way to do all three — which is why it anchors so many builds in the Monitoring stack.
Why this section exists.
The Home Assistant project produces excellent documentation at home-assistant.io. Nothing on OpenAgTechnology replaces that. What the official docs do not provide — and what this section does — is the agricultural context. A grower reading the official installation guide sees the same instructions a home-automation enthusiast sees. Those instructions are correct, but they assume a reader whose goals are lights, locks, and thermostats. The grower's goals are different. The failure modes are different. The hardware choices are different. The integrations that matter are different. The automations that pay for themselves are different.
This section fills that gap. It teaches Home Assistant the way a 45-year greenhouse veteran would teach it — not as a home-automation hobby, but as a working part of a real operation: the hub many growers choose to tie their monitoring and control together. One strong tool among several, not the whole system.
The hardware approach.
One decision in this section deserves to be named up front because it differs from what a grower will find almost everywhere else. Most Home Assistant resources recommend a Raspberry Pi or a Home Assistant Yellow / Green as the starting hardware. Those are reasonable for hobbyist deployments. For anything larger — a commercial greenhouse, a multi-zone operation, a grower who wants to add AI or computer vision or a deeper history database — the collective recommends something different.
The primary recommendation is a repurposed business-class desktop or laptop. An old office desktop or ThinkPad has more processing power, more memory, more storage, and more durability than a new Raspberry Pi. A laptop comes with its own battery, which serves as a free uninterruptible power supply when utility power blinks. Both can often be acquired free. Both support the graybox approach — one capable machine running Home Assistant alongside Docker, a database, a media server, file storage, a VPN, and anything else the operation needs.
Choosing Your Hardware is the deep-dive page. Repurposing a Desktop and Repurposing a Laptop cover the primary path. Using a Mini PC covers the secondary path. Purpose-Built HA Hardware covers the hobbyist tier honestly — where it fits, where it does not.
Installation methods.
Three installation methods this section covers in depth: Home Assistant OS (simplest path — dedicated OS), Home Assistant Supervised on Ubuntu (the graybox recommendation), and Home Assistant Container (bare Docker for hosts already running other services).
All 63 pages in this section.
Organized by what a grower is trying to do, not by topic taxonomy.