I have been starting up my new smart home since December of 2020.
I have been running HA on a VMware Workstation virtual machine on my main Windows laptop. However, I want to be able to run HA on a dedicated machine (such as a pi, etc.) so I can avoid using up RAM/CPU on my laptop (particularly since I game and do other stuff).
The devices I currently have are:
3 strip lights (Govee, LIFX, and Monster Smart)
1 desk lamp (Govee)
3 LG ThinQ devices (TV, Washer, Dryer)
1 Roku Express stick
1 Panasonic Viera TV
My phone to track location
1 Echo Dot
I plan to expand this soon by adding this Philips Hue starter kit and this Aurora dimmer. I am also considering getting motion sensors, door contacts, wall switches, and possibly a Google Nest hub. We’re also considering smart outdoor lighting as well to integrate with HA.
I also want a Zigbee/Z-Wave stick as well to handle my future Zigbee/Z-Wave devices on HA.
I do plan on also running nodered for some automations but most of my automations I will try to do with just HA.
It’s hard to say what you might consider a “starter kit” to be. It sounds like you already have a pretty good grasp on the essentials you need to spin up HA on a Pi. Are you looking for recommendations for the computer itself (i.e., Pi vs VMWare, etc) or for the hardware (Z-Stick, etc)?
For me, I use a Pi 4 with a 32GB SD card (migrating to SSD at some point when it becomes easier to do so) with Insteon and Z-Wave connected via USB controlling about 300 or so devices in total with integrations for just about any WiFi enabled device on my network.
I’m looking for recommendations for the actual hardware itself (the computer). I was looking on Amazon these Pi “starter kits”.
I was thinking of getting a 4 GB version just to be on the cheap side or pay the extra $20 to get the 8 GB version (would be good to expand on later if I move, etc)
HA doesn’t require a tremendous amount of horsepower, and for what you have the 4GB would be fine, but it’s so inexpensive to get the 8GB version you might as well future-proof yourself. The added benefit is that if you change things up later you have an extra Pi sitting around to run Pi-Hole or Homebridge or any number of other very useful applications in your Home Automation setup. Personally I have at least a dozen or so Pi’s for various things and I always buy the 8GB (with the exception of a handful of the Pi Zeros of course) because you just never know.
Ok, thank you. Glad you could help as I was kinda worried but I think the 8GB would be good as it’s only an extra $20 ($119 total) versus $99 for the 4GB.
I’m running it on a 10-year old laptop I got for free. I replaced its hard-drive with an inexpensive SSD. Its battery still holds a charge so it’s capable of riding out a 45-minute power failure. It has 4Gb of RAM. I installed Debian 10 and Home Assistant Supervised along with a few Add-Ons (Mosquitto MQTT Broker, Node-Red, etc). It consumes about 10 watts and its processor idles at ~3% most of the time. Works for me and the price was right.