In this Home Assistant 101 video, I’m starting from ground zero and showing you how I set up Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi—specifically a Raspberry Pi 5—so I can get my Apple Home back in order. I’m an Apple Home household (iPhones, iPads, the whole thing), but I use Home Assistant as the “power user” layer: better automations, more flexibility, and the ability to bring in devices Apple Home doesn’t normally support. The whole reason I’m doing this rebuild is because my attempt to migrate from a Raspberry Pi 4B to the 5 didn’t go perfectly, and I ended up losing a big chunk of my Apple Home bridge devices—so this is the clean setup process I’m using to recover. I walk through flashing Home Assistant to a microSD card using Raspberry Pi Imager, booting the Pi on Ethernet (I always recommend Ethernet when you can), finding the IP address, and loading Home Assistant on port 8123. From there, I cover the first-run setup, letting Home Assistant discover devices on the network, and I demo adding a real device (my Tailwind garage door opener) and organizing it into an “Entrance” area. Finally, I show how to grab the HomeKit pairing code, add the Home Assistant bridge into Apple Home, set up users (including my wife without admin access), enable Home Assistant Cloud (Nabu Casa) for remote access, and install a must-have add-on like File Editor.