Setting up Home Assistant

ScaleVault doesn't talk to thermostat/sensor vendors directly — it talks to Home Assistant once, and every device Home Assistant supports (Zigbee, Z-Wave, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, MQTT — thousands of integrations) comes along for free. This page covers the part before ScaleVault, from scratch: what Home Assistant even is, getting it running, and getting a sensor or button into it as an entity. Once that's done, connect it to ScaleVault from Account → Home Assistant.

Already have Home Assistant running? Skip ahead to getting a sensor connected or straight to connecting to ScaleVault.

The ScaleVault side of this (beta) is available on the Adult plan and above — worth checking before you invest an evening in Home Assistant setup if you're on a lower plan.

What is Home Assistant?

Home Assistant is free, open-source software that runs on a small computer in your home and acts as a hub for smart-home devices — it's not a ScaleVault product, and it's not a cloud service you sign up for. A few terms used throughout this page:

• Integration — the piece of software inside Home Assistant that knows how to talk to one brand or protocol (e.g. "Govee," "Zigbee," "ScaleVault"). You add one per device type/brand you own.
• Entity — an individual sensor, switch, or button that shows up because of an integration. A single Zigbee integration might give you dozens of entities, one per physical device.
• Automation — a "when X happens, do Y" rule (e.g. "when this button is pressed, log a feeding"). ScaleVault ships ready-made ones as blueprints.
• Dashboard — the web page you use to view and control everything, at http://homeassistant.local:8123 once it's running.

You don't need any of this to already make sense — the rest of this page walks through it in order.

1. Get a Home Assistant server running

Home Assistant runs on a small dedicated box in your house — not in ScaleVault's cloud, and not on your phone. Pick one:

Option	Best for	Roughly	Notes
Home Assistant Green	Most people	$100	Plug-and-play appliance, no setup beyond following the box's instructions
Home Assistant Yellow	Tinkerers who want Zigbee/Thread built in	$150+	Case + radios built around a Raspberry Pi Compute Module
Raspberry Pi + Home Assistant OS	If you already own a Pi	$0–80	Flash an SD card with the official installer image
Old laptop/mini PC + Container install	You already have spare hardware or a home server/NAS	$0	Most flexible, most manual

None of these need to be powerful — Home Assistant is light on CPU/RAM; the cost differences above are about convenience and built-in radios, not performance.

Full install steps live on home-assistant.io/installation — Home Assistant's own docs cover this far better than we can, and they change as new hardware ships. In broad strokes: you plug in the box (or flash the SD card and plug that in), wait a few minutes for it to boot, then open http://homeassistant.local:8123 in a browser on the same Wi-Fi network. Home Assistant's own onboarding wizard walks you through creating an admin account — this account lives only on your Home Assistant box and has nothing to do with your ScaleVault login.

You do not need a Nabu Casa / Home Assistant Cloud subscription for ScaleVault to work. That subscription is for remote access to your HA dashboard from outside your home network; ScaleVault only needs your Home Assistant instance to make outbound requests to the internet, which a purely local install can already do.

2. Get a sensor talking to Home Assistant

How a sensor connects depends on its radio, not on ScaleVault:

Sensor type	Example brands	Sensor cost	What you need
Wi-Fi, cloud-based	Govee, SwitchBot, some Inkbird models	$15–30	Just the manufacturer's Home Assistant integration — usually an account login, no extra hardware
Zigbee	Aqara, SONOFF, most inexpensive temp/humidity pucks	$10–20	A Zigbee coordinator plugged into your HA box (e.g. SkyConnect, $20–40 one-time) plus Zigbee Home Automation (ZHA) or Zigbee2MQTT
Z-Wave	Some Aeotec/Ecolink sensors	$30–50	A Z-Wave stick (e.g. Aeotec Z-Stick, $50+ one-time) plus the Z-Wave integration
Bluetooth / BTHome	Many budget temp/humidity sensors (some Inkbird/Xiaomi/ATC-flashed models)	$10–20	Bluetooth built into your HA box, or an ESPHome Bluetooth proxy if the sensor is out of range
DIY / MQTT	ESP32 + a DHT22/BME280 probe	$5–15 in parts	ESPHome — write a small YAML file, flash the board, it shows up in HA automatically

The Zigbee coordinator/Z-Wave stick is a one-time cost shared across every sensor of that type — the more sensors you add on the same radio, the cheaper each one gets relative to Wi-Fi/cloud sensors that need no coordinator but usually cost more per unit.

Whichever path you use, once the sensor shows up under Settings → Devices & Services → Entities in Home Assistant as a sensor.* entity, it's ready to map in ScaleVault.

3. Get a button/trigger talking to Home Assistant (for quick-log actions)

Quick-log actions (feeding, watering, cleaning) need something to trigger them — the same sensor-vs-radio logic applies:

• Zigbee/Z-Wave button — a battery button like an Aqara/SONOFF scene switch, paired the same way as a Zigbee/Z-Wave sensor above.
• NFC tag — the Home Assistant companion app on your phone can trigger an automation by scanning a cheap NFC sticker on an enclosure.
• ESPHome button — a physical button wired to an ESP32/ESP8266, same DIY path as a sensor.
• A dashboard button — no hardware at all; add a button card to a Home Assistant dashboard.

Whatever trigger you use, wire it up with one of the ScaleVault blueprints (quick_log_action.yaml or quick_log_husbandry.yaml) instead of writing the automation from scratch.

4. Install HACS (recommended)

The ScaleVault integration installs through HACS (the Home Assistant Community Store) — a marketplace for community integrations that doesn't ship with Home Assistant by default, so it's a one-time setup of its own:

1. Follow HACS's official download guide — it walks through installing the HACS integration itself (a small script, then a restart).
2. Add HACS as an integration in Settings → Devices & Services → Add Integration → HACS and authorize it against your GitHub account (a free GitHub account works fine — this is just how HACS verifies you're not hitting GitHub's download limits, it doesn't touch your ScaleVault account).
3. Restart Home Assistant once more when prompted.

Skip this step only if you plan to use the manual rest_command recipe in step 5 instead of the full integration.

5. Connect to ScaleVault

Once Home Assistant has your sensors/buttons as entities (and HACS installed, if you're using it):

1. In ScaleVault, go to Account → Home Assistant and generate a connection key.
2. In HACS, add https://github.com/Dinohouse-Digital-LLC/scalevault-homeassistant as a custom repository (category: Integration), install ScaleVault, restart Home Assistant, then add it under Settings → Devices & Services → Add Integration → ScaleVault and paste the key — or use the rest_command recipe in the Setup instructions panel if you'd rather skip HACS entirely.
3. Add a sensor mapping for each temperature/humidity entity, optionally pointing it at an enclosure. Readings are batched and pushed automatically from there.

Troubleshooting

• Entity not showing up in the mapping dropdown — confirm it's a sensor.* domain entity with a numeric state (Home Assistant → Developer Tools → States is the fastest way to check).
• Zigbee/Z-Wave device won't pair — move it closer to the coordinator for initial pairing; range is the most common cause, not a bad device.
• Readings arrive late or not at all — check the integration card in Account → Home Assistant for last_synced_at and any error, and confirm your HA instance has outbound internet access (a fully air-gapped install can't reach ScaleVault).
• Not sure which radio your sensor uses — check the product listing or box; "Zigbee" and "Z-Wave" are always labeled, unlabeled battery sensors are usually Bluetooth.
• homeassistant.local:8123 doesn't load — some routers/networks don't support that .local address. Find the device's IP address instead (check your router's device list) and use http://<that-ip>:8123.

Tips

• Start with one sensor and one enclosure mapping to confirm the whole chain works before wiring up a whole rack.
• A Zigbee/Z-Wave coordinator plus a handful of inexpensive puck sensors is usually cheaper than vendor-specific "smart" thermostats — and none of them require giving ScaleVault (or Home Assistant) a vendor cloud login.
• If you outgrow Wi-Fi/cloud sensors' reliability, Zigbee is the most common upgrade path — mesh networking means more sensors improve range instead of congesting it.
• Budget an evening for first-time setup if you're new to Home Assistant — most of it is waiting for downloads/reboots, not difficulty.
• Home Assistant ships monthly updates; update from its own Settings → System → Updates page periodically. This is unrelated to ScaleVault and doesn't affect your connection key.