pi-mqtt-gpio VS raspberry-pi-home-automation

Home Assistant doesn't have direct control of GPIOs built-in anymore, but it's available with either a custom component or MQTT.

If you want to play around with sensors on a RPi, you can use your existing network and use MQTT to communicate back to your hub. Take a look at https://github.com/flyte/mqtt-io.

If you install this on the RPI, https://github.com/flyte/mqtt-io setup the digital output to turn the relay on and off and add the HA discovery option, then it will show up as an MQTT switch in Home Assistant and you can turn it on and off from HA

I currently use ESP devices with sensors attached in my house however you may be able to use a Raspberry Pi instead and have certain sensors such as Temperature, PIR motion etc ... https://github.com/flyte/pi-mqtt-gpio

I have the raspberry pi just running rasbian. I'm using pi-mqtt-gpio to expose the GPIO to MQTT, which then allows HA to pick them up and control them. I went through a few iterations trying to get that to work, including using the remote_pi_gpio integration, but had problems with it. With the integration, every time the pi restarted, HA would need to be restarted to re-establish the connection, and there were times that the GPIO settings on the pi would get reset and HA would lose them. With the pi-mqtt-gpio, it's been way easier and way more stable. I can boot the pi or HA in either order and the connection will still come up every time I've tried. If you're going to do remote gpio with a pi, I definitely recommend it. The MQTT integration in HA picks up the gpio automatically, so there's no HA configuration to be done. My pi-mqtt-gpio configuration: https://imgur.com/imTnUvX

I have done this, and wrote a book about it: https://koen.vervloesem.eu/books/control-your-home-with-raspberry-pi/.

I'm managing all these services with Docker Compose. This means I only have to backup one directory with the configuration and data of all services, and one file, the docker-compose.yml file that defines all services. You can find all source code of the book in its repository (https://github.com/koenvervloesem/raspberry-pi-home-automation), to give you an idea about how you would manage this.