I’ve utilized the odroid N2+ for years and it comes with GPIO pins. I believe it’s the best platform to build a robust smart house controller and it is supported by HA OS. My initial install was on a raspberry pi but I found it to be way to slow.
I believe the best smart home architecture start with a lower power primary controller as the brains of your system running HA and then a second server for resource heavy apps like frigate and voice processing. This separation ensure you have basic smart home features that can’t be knocked out by a secondary smart house feature. It also allows for a small battery back implantation for the master controller. As the master controller would also provide home security functionality, this ensures security features stays operational during a power outage.
I am disappointed that if I choose to use HA OS instead of the supervised install that I lose access to some nice hardware and software features/options. In reality it was this type of restriction that made me move over to the HA supervisor installation years ago. I would love to see HA OS move to distributed hardware model. One where I could install primary functionality on the master controller and then setup slave controllers that could run some of the ha addons.
I’m going to look at splitting my implementation across 3 devices now. One running HA OS providing HA GUI and smart house control. One providing the GPIO interface and smart networking that provides backup internet access via cellular. The last being a container server for frigate, voice processing and anything else. The first two will be on battery backup, the container serve will not.
It’s the features I documented here and here that I need to shuffle in order to move over to HA OS for the master controller. The slave controller will run a different Linux distribution for now.
Maybe someday HA will support a master/slave architecture where all devices are loaded with HA OS. The master controller would have the most restrictions. Then they could provide a little more flexibility on the slave controllers. Like supporting GPIO access on a slave controller.