I’ve played with HA a bit and I even managed to build a working system but … the house has been sold and now, being at the stage of general renovation of a new house, I wonder how to deal with the new project.
5 bed, 4 bath, cellar, solar panels & heat pump along with half a dozen or more PoE cameras, motions sensors for gate/garage doors … etc …of course Plex and music server, NAS … Not overely keen on voice controls
At this stage, everything is possible I have not started CAT6 cables yet - I would like the alarm / cameras to work on PoE … I will have a server room & room to accomodate the “control center”
To date I’ve only tinkered with HA on RPi or in docker on my NAS… I suppose this time NUC or something similar would better serve here; I’ve used & have serveral bits & bobs from Sonoff, Aqara, several Alexa speakers and Eufy doorbell
As I havent built/modernized a home yet and only made my own room smart, I cant give many advises on that part.
But getting a NUC or a full Server inside a server rack would be a huge upgrade to your pi. I myself used a pi3b+ at first, migrated to an old office pc and then to my old gaming pc. The speed improvement was huge.
I personally would recommend getting a really powerful server and use it as HA server and NAS. When you want to use HAOS natively on the bare metal server, you could use the samba addon for example. But i personally use ubuntu server 20.04 lts, with only one windows VM for my backup solution (Veeam Backup and Replication) and HA supervised install (im a tinkerer, so i dont care about official support). Network storage is realized with samba, all data will be protected by raid1, once i migrate over to my new bigger server, and my backup solution.
Anyways, a good rack to a have a central space is a really good investment. That was also a huge improvement for me, having a rackmount 24port switch, my router, my 2 servers and accessories and a rackmount power strip, not only regarding to looks, but also better protection against dust and any other mechanical influence.
The POE cameras will take up a lot of bandwidth and processing power. I run a program called Blue Iris on a dedicated PC for my cams. I have a managed switch that provides POE power to the cams, and lets me keep each cam isolated on a VLAN, so they can’t misbehave. Chinese cams have been known to have backdoors.
VLAN’s are obviously optional, but you need either a POE capable switch, or you can buy a NVR from the camera manufacturer to power the cams, and replace the Blue Iris/PC combination.
Dahua and Hikvision are two OEMs that make cameras. I’d pick one brand and use that one, I have Dahua and like them.
Common cam mistakes are placing too high. Better aesthetics for your home, but looking at the tops of heads isn’t real helpful, or too wide angle. Wide angle shows you a lot, but trying to zoom in on a face will give you a fuzzy image. You also want a camera with good low light performance, bad things often happen after dark. You want to place cameras at entry points, doors or any place you think someone could break in at. You also want to record 24/7, because you never know when something will happen.
I go to ipcamtalk for advice on cameras, NVRs, or PC recorders and other related subjects.
I have not started CAT6 cables yet - I would like the alarm / cameras to work on PoE … I will have a server room & room to accomodate the “control center”