Hi All,
New to HA but have been using Indigo for the last 5+ years or so.
I currently have over 1000 devices in Indigo and primarily use Z-Wave for my devices.
So what hardware should I be buying to run HA with plenty of space for future expansion please?
Don’t worry about budget, since Indigo requires a £1,000+ Mac Mini to run it !
You may gift the remaining 950 GBP to me (if it is still possible after Brexit) 
I read that but wondered if the 4 would scale to 1000+ devices well? I’ve seen mentions of SSDs etc on here too?
5 minutes on google. PI4 not suitable as there are issues with the Z-Wave stick and power issues.
So looks like we’re in intel NUC territory which is half the cost of a Mac?
I run on a 5 year old dell i3 workstation, running Debian 10 and a supervised install of home assistant.
I also run Plex server and quite a few ha addons on that box.
CPU sits at below 1% most of the time.
I have 6gb of ram, 2gb are in use.
I use an SSD as the main drive, mainly for noise / energy use reasons.
Indeed, basically any computer that you’re happy to leave on 24/7 - hence most people go for a low power option. Personally I have a dell optiplex 7010 here, and before that had a dell wyse thin client thing.
NUC is a popular choice because they’re so small and powerful, but in all honesty they’re massively overpowered for homeassistant and therefore not very cost effective unless you have plans for the rest of the power.
That said if ‘money is no object’ I’d probably go NUC, they’re very pretty.
Welcome to HA, I’m also an Indigo refugee and for the same reason, a $1K computer plus the renewal of Indigo each year (and other stuff HA offers). I don’t have over 1,000 devices but I have a couple hundred. I’ve been using Insteon, Z-Wave, X10 and Zigbee without any major headaches so far.
Colorado!? Hey! If that is you, it was actually your post that brought me over to trying HA out.
In just an hour or two I have nearly all my devices in HA (I’m yet to figure out the Z-Wave migration yet or get the basic automatons setup…)
But so far this seems to be a much better supported system, more integrations, more devices, and my god, the UI is incredibly simple! It puts the Control Pages to shame!
Installed it on my QNAP so no separate dedicated machine, I just hope it’s as reliable as Indigo has been for me over the years.
Whelp, I guess Matt and Jay will hate me now 
. Yea Lovelace is far better than Control Pages!
I’ve started writing an Indigo users guide to HA for transitioning .
Awesome. Let me know if you have any tips for migrating?
Not sure how I tackle z-wave yet.
Exclude then reinclude?
Or
Pull the USB from the Mac and just rediscover all the devices again
Not read up on anything yet as having too much fun with everything else!
I can give you one thing off the bat that I found immensely helpful: prefixing all my automations with "Schedule: ", "Trigger: " and "Action Groups: "! I really saw automations as a mess when I first switched, but when I did that I actually like it far better than having Indigo’s categorized UI.
As for Z-Wave, it’ll be a bit of a pain and a bigger pain to come. The bigger pain is that HA is switching to ZWaveJS for the engine and there will likely be a lot of re-do when that happens. The reason is because the current ZWave engine is not maintained and has a few bugs here and there (but has worked great for me).
Setting up Z-Wave was pretty easy, I moved my USB stick over and 90% of my devices got discovered in HA. A handful of them, including ANY secure nodes, had to be unpaired and repaired with the stick.
Z-Wave is definitely “pokey-er” than Indigo because the current Z-Wave implementation doesn’t support multi-cast, so you might be in for a bit of a shock at first when controlling a large group of devices, it’s not as zippy as Indigo. However the new ZWaveJS does have multicast so that should improve things.
One other thing is that the current engine takes quite a while to spin up Z-Wave after restarts (again, better in ZWaveJS from what I’ve read). For my 200 or so devices it takes 3-4 minutes after reboot before my Z-Wave is set.
HomeKit integration is pretty darn good! I’m going to start contributing to that extension because there are some things I would like to do with it, but it has most of what I wrote into HomeKit Bridge.
Setting up Z-Wave is actually quite simple, but it took me a while to figure that out 
. There are two things I found when doing it that, had I know before, would have made Z-Wave setup a breeze.
configuration.yaml:
zwave:
usb_path: /dev/ttyACM0
device_config: !include zwave_device_config.yaml
Here’s the tricky bit, the docs mention putting your Z-Wave network key in configuration.yaml but I had loads of problems, what I found worked immediately was editing the .storage/core.config_entries and putting my key in there (just search for “zwave” and there will be a place for network key there).
I tried migrating the Indigo network key so I didn’t have to re-pair locks, but it never worked so I just generated a new key from a shell with:
cat /dev/urandom | tr -dc '0-9A-F' | fold -w 32 | head -n 1 | sed -e 's/\(..\)/0x\1, /g' -e 's/, $//'
When I was testing I just moved my Z-Stick from Indigo to HA and back, so 90% discovery was fine and allowed me to get most of my network pre-configured before committing fully to HA.
Oh, yea, and another thing I recommend is to install HACS, it’s a user-written extension that lets you install all sorts of other user-written extensions outside of Integration and Add-Ons. I mention this because there is one in there called Custom Buttons that really does some super cool stuff with Lovelace that will blow you away compared to Indigo!
Also, also, if you want some scripts to talk to Indigo let me know. I wrote a few during migration so I could use both side-by-side. Just a few API calls to control things like my thermostat that was still in Indigo because I used the old Nest integration and never migrated to Google for it. It requires installing pyscript.
Thanks! This is all great info 
I think I’ll be ok for migration as most of my devices are already in HA, then it’s just the lights and locks on Z-Wave.
Out of interest, if I pulled the stick and connected it to HA, if something didn’t work can I plug it back into the Mac and everything carries on like before?
Already got HACS installed as I needed a couple of plugins on there but super interested at what’s possible with the web interface (wife pleasing features!)
Yes! Unless you have added/removed devices from the stick then it should work a charm.
I ended up getting a Home Assistant Blue which runs in my server room and reused the Pi 4 which I put upstairs in my Den. The Pi runs zwave2jsmqtt in a docker setup. What is nice is when I restart Home Assistant my zwave stays running. Did the same with Zigbee. Also thinking of putting my MQTT broker on that as well so it can queue messages