I run HA on an RPi4. Now, I have another use for that Pi so maybe it would make sense to move to a “dedicated” HA unit. I see there’s already Home Assistant Blue - are there others? Are they “live” projects that are stable and have some amount of support?
I see “Amber” is in development, but that’s a ways in the future. Is it supposed to replace “Blue”?
From what I can tell,Home Assistant Yellow r is more powerful & flexible in hardware configuration.
I have an ha blue. I bought it as my first foray into home automation.
It’s only been about 2 months, and I already find myself wishing I had spent the money for a nuc or something similar that would offer greater power and flexibility.
As a point of reference, I have roughly 125 items (switches, light bulbs, garage door opener, media players, thermostat, temp sensors, motion sensors, door/window sensors, water leak detectors), about 50 automations, and half a dozen dashboard tabs. So far the power/performance has been adequate, but it sure would be nice to be able to run plex and some other stuff that’s popped up to add on to ha.
I am not sure you could do this with HaOS, whatever the platform. It is designed solely to be a minimal sized hypervisor for the HA containers.
You could do it with Home Assistant Supervised, on Debian, but as soon as you add anything like Plex to the OS, HA is officially unsupported. Your other option would be Home Assistant Container but you lose the Supervisor & addons. I personally use Container.
I didn’t even know that you could do any of that? I had mentioned a nuc, with the intention of running a hypervisor on top of it and using other VMs on the nuc for the additional stuff.
You could run HaOS in a VM as another supported option.
Back to the OT, it looks like one of these dedicated RPi systems wouldn’t do much for me besides avoid the hassles of initial HA installation. I don’t use Zigbee and don’t have performance issues with the RPi4.
If you’re obsessed about running supported installs, you can run supervised hassos in a virtual machine running debian 11.
edit: consensus is to install hassos (or whatever it’s called now) in the virtual machine than debian 11.
don’t fix it if it ain’t broken
But HaOS would be a smaller VM, i suspect.
same idea, you could have a multi function computer, and still have a supported HA install, while running multiple other services. Just have to put home assistant in a virtual machine.
There is a Plex add-on in the store, so you can indeed run Plex and be supported.
Much easier to run HA OS as a VM and spin up Debian / Ubuntu VMs for other software. It’s kind of redundant to install Supervised in a Debian VM when you don’t need to.
There are so many ways to go with machine types depending on what you want to achieve. If you don’t currently have the need for a more powerful machine and your system is working well, then stick with what you have and grab yourself another Pi for the new project.
