Which hardware platform to choose to use Home Assistant as a mobile data acquisition platform for physiological sensors?

Last Updated on May 28, 2023 by pg@petergamma.org

Home Assistant is the second active Python application. If offers many features for Home Automation. But several sport watches can also be attached or synchronized to Home Assistant, as for instance the Apple watch:

Once sensor data are in Home Assistant, data can easily be exported to InfluxDB and visualized in Grafana. From there, we can do further sensor data processing with the InfluxDB client for Python. So we have a mobile data acquisition system similar to Matlab, but it does not require a 1000 USD Matlab license, and it runs also on the ARM based Raspberry Pi. It would be highly desirable to have also an alternative image for instance for the Orange Pi 5.

There is a Home Assistant image available for the Raspberry Pi. But if we want to modify the Home Assistant .yaml file for development, we need the Home Assistant Operating System version of HA. There is a version for Raspberry Pi available, but it is difficult to put together.

For x86 based platforms, there is a Home Assistant Operating System image available:

https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/generic-x86-64

We have installed it on a HP workstation and it works great. If we want to run it mobile, we can choose for instance a LattePanda V1. This is the easiest solution we know. We promote here this new physiological sensor platform based on HA, since it is a modern platform which offers many software components which are also helpful for physiology.

There is an instruction available, how to read and write data from InfluxDB in Python from computer engineering student Rahul Banerjee.

https://thenewstack.io/getting-started-with-python-and-influxdb/