Hi! In this update, we want to share a bit more about the Air Lab Home Assistant Integration. We wrote this campaign update in the style of a tutorial. This way you know exactly what it takes to use the Air Lab with Home Assistant and can follow it step-by-step when you get your device.

Home Assistant

The Home Assistant project was started more than 10 years ago to provide an open-source platform for home automation. Today, many proprietary and open smart home devices can be connected to Home Assistant in order to read out their data or control them.

Many people deploy Home Assistant to a Raspberry Pi, which is a perfect host for such software. With the official “Raspberry Pi Imager” it is trivial to prepare an SD-Card with a full installation of Home Assistant ready to be set up. If you do not have a Raspberry Pi, check out their website for alternative installation options on your computer or in the cloud.

Follow these steps to set up Home Assistant:

1. Download the Raspberry Pi Imager application.
2. Burn a microSD card using the “Home Assistant Image” found under “Other specific-purpose OS” > “Home assistants and home automation” > “Home Assistant”.
3. Plug the microSD into your Raspberry Pi, connect Ethernet, and connect power.
4. Once the initial boot is done, the IP address should be printed on the screen.
5. Go to http://IP_ADDRESS:8123 to open the web interface.
6. Follow the initial setup steps to configure your Home Assistant installation.

MQTT Integration

Home Assistant supports multiple standards and protocols to integrate products with its system. While some are native/custom integrations written in Python, it also supports connecting devices with buses/bridges for Matter, Bluetooth, Zigbee, MQTT, and other protocols. For our initial integration with Air Lab, we decided to go with MQTT because of its simplicity. We might explore more “native” ways of integration in the future.

The MQTT protocol is a widely supported IoT protocol that is based on the standard TCP/IP network stack. To get communication going, it requires a “broker” to act as an intermediary to relay messages between clients. This architecture is very powerful and allows you to listen for the Air Lab sensor data from multiple applications at the same time. The Mosquitto MQTT broker is a widely used open-source broker that is also available for Home Assistant as an add-on.

Follow these steps to install the Mosquitto Add-on:

1. Go to “Settings”, then “Add-ons” and click on the Link to the add-on-store.
2. Search for “MQTT” in the search bar at the top, select “Mosquitto broker” and click “Install”.
3. Once the add-on is installed, click “Start” to have Home Assistant run it in the background.
4. We also recommend to enable the “Start on Boot” and “Watchdog” options to ensure, Mosquitto is always running.

Air Lab Configuration

To connect the Air Lab with the Mosquitto Broker and, in turn, with Home Assistant, we need to configure the Wi-Fi network and MQTT credentials. To do that, we’ll use the Air Lab Studio, our web-based interface, to access the Air Lab and configure it.

Follow these steps to configure your Air Lab:

• Make sure your Air Lab is plugged in to prevent it from automatically sleeping.
• Go to Air Lab Studio in Chrome-based browsers that supports Bluetooth.
• Click “Connect” and select your device from the appeared drop-down.
• In the sidebar, navigate to “Settings”.
• Enter your SSID and password in the “Wi-Fi” section and click “Configure”.
• Under the “MQTT” section:
  • Enter the IP-Address of the Home Assistant as the “Host”.
  • Ensure the “Port” is set to 1883.
  • Enter your previously chosen username/password for Home Assistant as “Username” and “Password.
  • Finally, click “Configure” to apply the settings.
• If everything is correct, the Connection status in the sidebar should change to “Networked”. If it remains “Disconnected” check the Wi-Fi settings, and if it is just “Connected”, check the MQTT settings.
• Finally, activate the “Enabled” checkbox under then “Home Assistant” section to enable the Home Assistant auto discovery mechanism.

Final Steps

Home Assistant will automatically detect the device and add its entities to the system. You can now add the sensor values to your dashboard and configure automations that use the data as triggers or conditions.

Thanks for your interest in Air Lab! If you haven’t yet, now’s your chance to reserve your Air Lab while our crowdfunding campaign is live!