Building a simple home assistant (part 1)
Published on: 21st July 2025
I’d been YouTube-bingeing on Home Assistant content recently, particiularly the great Jeff Geerling and some of the incredible stuff he’s built. It got me thinking.
Thinking. No good can come of this.
Anyway, I was thinking ‘maybe I could make a simple home assistant.’ Nothing fancy, but good enough for home and maybe at work. We have lots of labs and offices where we need to know the temperature, humidity and CO2 levels. I could go and spend some money on a Pi, dongle and sensors, maybe getting everything through the multiple levels of approval needed (“You want to plug in a what?!”). Or maybe I could reuse an old server and attach something to a £6 pico.
So my ingredients are:
- A microcontroller with wireless built in.
- A sensor that could be attached to the microcontroller.
- A server to receive and record the values.
I’ve got a Pico W lying around at home, so that’s sorted. I can get a temperature and humidity sensor from Pimoroni, but I’ll also get a breakout garden. That way I don’t need to do any soldering while I’m testing, provided the sensor is breakout-compatible.
A brief order later, I have everything. Two minutes after that and it’s all assembled.
I need to write some simple code for the pico and have a server online to receive the readings. I already have a server on the internet - you’re reading a page from it now. So let’s see if I can join everything together!