Since me and my family bought a new house, I want to start well and get into the world of smart homes.
After searching the web for a good week for imformation, I decided to go for home Assistant.
The complexibility scares me a little bit but Im confident that with this large and supportive community I will eventually figure things out.
As for what do I want to install the home assistant operating system on I decided it would be a smart pc. Mostly cause I want to be sure that im future proof the more smart I will make my house in the future. (And also alot of raspi stuff seems hard to get my hands on atm and a bit technical)
I stumbled upon a refurbished mini pc and im wondering since this is (imo) a fairly nice budget price a good option to start out on?
It might be a bit outdated with the ddr3 over ddr4 etc but im not sure what I should be prioritising.
With respect to Home Assistant, those refurbished thin clients are more than powerful enough to run even complex setups. Good price, too - I just payed 120 EUR each for 3 Lenovo M92P, being similar hardware. Installing Linux on these (designated Kubernetes) nodes was tricky, due to the UEFI bios, but worked out in the end.
Is that a mandatory thing to do? So far my plan is to get one of the mini pc I linked and an addition zigbee usb and use the guide found here. After that it’s more research on whats next to get me going.
Off topic question btw. Im planning to test everything in my current house and use a couple of hue lights and a speaker to get my knowledge going. Will it give alot of issues continueing after moving? (new internet and location etc.)
I did exactly the same, but decided to do a fresh start at our new house.
New internet should not be an issue if you use Nabu Casa or Duck DNS. If you use the same static IP adresses for your devices (like HA server, Hue bridge, etc) afterwards you should be fine too. Some integrations do have problems with changing IP adresses. Be also sure to set up your home zone new acordingly.
Hue devices use Zigbee protocol. As long as you use the same coordinator device (Zigbee dongle) along with it’s configuration and database - it should™ work.