Dear All,
I’m at the start of a Home Assistant journey, and I hope you don’t mind me shooting the breeze and sharing my plans for a Home Assistant project, and soliciting a bit of advice and asking for some recommendations.
The backbone of the project will be a KNX system, for which the HA will act as the visualisation.
There are probably somewhere near around 200 devices on the network spread across 3 lines. Some are 24 way actuators.
Other things to interface to:
A fair few one wire sensors used for heating control.
A number of Modbus Heat Meters
Exterior and feature lighting through DMX lighting protocal.
A Nuvo Whole home audio system driven through RS232
Around 24 CCTV cameras. A mixture of analogue and digital - the old analogue ones will have a convertor to produce a digital signal, but are of lower resolution.
Fire Alarm will probably have a graphics output that could be used to say what zone is in alarm e.t.c. that will likely be either RS232 or IP based (there are a choice of interfaces).
The biomass boiler has a CAN bus interface, however, the data is coded in a proprietary format and I haven’t seen a breakdown of the protocol.
I have looked at the PI based solutions, but I am wondering if I will need something a bit more powerful, obviously NUCs are a favoured solution, but wondering whether it might be better to build something to sit in a rack given the need for Coral support (See below)…
I am not sure whether to build the system as an all in one, with the box doing HA, also being an NVR / Media Server for the network, or whether to seperate these functions out. If it was an all in one, I’d probably look for a rack enclosure, where I could have a Motherboard with RAID SSD on the board, and then have a bunch of external mechanical HDDs for bulk storage. But then if my M2 slots get taken up with SSD’s then it doesn’t leave much room for Corals… would be good if someone made a Mobo with an array of M2s.
I am interested in using Frigate for AI on the CCTV, but given the number of cameras, imagine that I would need more than a dual Coral card. I have seen a few people that build beefier cards with an enromous amount of Corals cascaded, these come out fairly pricey though, but could be an option.
I’ve been through a few iterations of thinking about what is the best server to use before settling on Home Assisstant At one point I was thinking about the KNX based GIRA Homeserver, but that wasn’t updated and can’t talk to many things… then I thought about Loxone, however, they moved from a model of openness to being closed and proprietary, then I was looking at Elaborated Networks Timberwolf Server, which is great technically, but the visualisation services like Cometvisu seem a bit limited.
The Timberwolf servers have been through a few different iterations, there were some more powerful models, but the present is Raspberry Pi CM4 based. It is quite powerful for a lot of things, and they have developed a system to be able to manage a range of interfaces and bring them all together, but I wonder whether there will be the flexibility of something like Home Assistant that because of the size of the Community should be really resilient in the longer run.
I suppose at the time, I had started to get my head around using the Timberwolf server for low level logic, but wasn’t really happy with it as a visualisation solution. It provides a convenient way to aggregate interfaces to a lot of different mediums and could then connect to HA using MQTT, but I am wondering whether I wouldn’t just be better off taking everything into the HA, and then having a unified portal for all logic and visualisation e.t.c.
I’m thinking that from maintainability e.t.c. I’d be best off building a “big box” server, that did everything and could serve not only HA in a VM, but also act as an NVR / Plex server e.t.c.
For CCTV I am thinking that Frigate would be a smart move. There are quite a few cameras to process data from, so currently thinking what is the best solution with the Corals, as I think I will need several of them. Obviously the ASUS PCI cards provide a very trick solution for aggregating many but they are £££ currently just searching the rounds to see if anyone has had any luck with PCI cards accepting multiple cheap M.2 Corals e.t.c.
Then also thinking of running a Plex server.
That’s where I am at for now… welcome any thoughts, realise search is my friend and have been researching, but thought I would share what I am trying to do in the hope someone might find it interesting.