The Reason Behind the Install:
Through connections from family I learned of the peril they had to go through with the iAqualink App to control their pool remotely with some of the equipment they had. Instead of making all the equipment available on the mobile app iAqualink would force you to view them through the early 2000s designed web portal which was just not going to work. With I having a background in what Home Assistant can offer me and how I can really tailor it to my needs I set on seeing if there was anyway of getting iAqualink to integrate with Home Assistant. Luckily for me I found one instantly that was a core integration and did have some issues on GitHub but was willing to overlook if it just connected. Integration on Home Assistant The only downside with the integration is unlike the Pentair pool systems it is cloud but with my testing it seemed to be almost instant in actions to occur.
Example of What the iAquaLink Integration Offers:
Getting the Parts and Pieces to start the Project:
In some previous installs of Home Assistant I have elected to use Raspberry Pi’s but as many may know getting a hold of them was like getting a hold of toilet paper during the pandemic. It wasn’t happening. So I thought to myself of some other options, Dell Optiplex (too much power and expensive), VM at my house (Heck no, because I rather have something on premise), I was stumped to say the least until I thought of those little thin clients from way back when. I was sure they wouldn’t have enough power until I found the Dell Wyse 5070. Perfect! a Celeron J4105 with 4 cores and 4 thread should be able to power through anything Home Assistant could do, and with the 10w TDP it fit the bill. Looking at eBay these things are all over the place coming with a power cable, the desktop itself, and a little stand so it can sit on a shelf.
The only other thing I did to the PC was adding a 256GB SATA III m.2 SSD just to increase of it’s already added 16gb. I picked 256gb because it was so cheap they didn’t even offer 128 anymore! 
Installation was very easy and it worked right on first boot!
Installation of Home Assistant:
Not going to go indepth here I just did the standard Home Assistant OS install. Which is a little daunting at first as Home Assistant doesn’t have an installer so you manually use a Ubuntu LiveCD and install it from there onto the SSD. I also installed HACS (Home Assistant Community Store) for some custom buttons and thermostat cards I have used previously.
Remote Accessability after it’s Shipped:
I elected to use Cloudflare’s Zero Trust Tunnels (Formerly Argo Tunnels) to facilitate the connection to the PC when it first boots online to start configuration as no ports would be open yet. To open those ports I used the Firefox Docker Container to have a graphical web browser to login the router and open the needed ports needed for Home Assistant and remote accessibility.
Final Look:
Explanation on what you see:
- All the Pool Entities are using the standard iAqualink Integration from Home Assistant
- The thermostat panels are from the HACS (Home Assistant Community Store) project Simple Thermostat
- The Pool Color Options are automations to set the color of the lights on the pool depending on which one is on.
![Example for Green Color]()
![Deeper Look]()
![Even Deeper Look]()
Final Thoughts:
Overall, I had a very fun time with this project and learning the ropes of working remotely from thousands of miles away across the U.S. But, what I can say is it has been working very reliabily for the past 3 months and the client is very happy with not having to mess with that awful interface from before.