HO start but witch hardware should I choose?

Hardware
1

Hey,
I am Oli, new here and a beginner with HO.

I actually have an openHAB system coupled to my LCN Smart Home with the LCN VISU and a very default “dashboard” if I could call it like that.

I want to set up a HO system to visualize and control everything.
Now before the beginning I am very uncertain which hardware I should use.

This is my plan right now for the start:

Connect my LCN Smart Home (www.lcn.eu) to my home assistant. It contains all lights, roller shutter, weather station, lawn sprinklers and some more things in my house.
Plan is to visualize everything to control and monitor it. In openHAB it was not possible to configure a “hit key” to the LCN system which is necessary to close all shutters at once.

I took a look onto the bindings list and found some things which brings more ideas for future:

  • Monitor my Alpha Innotec heat pump. Maybe switch on and off the cooling function in summer. Log some history for energy input and output.
  • Control our roborock S5 max vacuum.
  • Monitor the remaining time from our dish washer (siemens home connect)
  • Our two electric meter (house and heat pump) should be monitored to create some history diagrams and live usage.
  • 3-4 cameras around the house. (maybe Reolink with Synology NAS or something else)
  • The lawn sprinklers are supplied by a rainwater tank, so it would be nice to know its water level inside the 7000 liter.
  • A touch display in our kitchen to control and monitor everything. (LAN/WLAN and 230V are available at this position) at the beginning it would be ok to use the iphone or ipad.
    It should although be possible to view the cameras and to control spotify and/or my Sonos system with it. Show the weather forecast and so on.
  • Connect my Dreambox 820 HD with Enigma 2
  • In far future I want to add a solar power station to my roof which should be implemented, but this will took some time.

The Smart Home logic should stay in the LCN Network and the HO should just be a visualization to control and monitor it.

My first question is: which hardware would you recommend? I don’t have any of this hardware until now so I would have to buy all of them:

#1 Raspberry Pi (Which one)
#2 a virtual box on synology NAS which is planed to replace my WD my cloud and to record the planed cameras.
#3 intel NUC. I think with the cameras and maybe other options in future a NUC will be the better solution, even if I don’t know anything about raspberry and had to learn it, so my plan is directly to learn Intel NUC 
#4 a thin client touch display with integrated mini pc.
#5 a zero client touch display which is connected to raspberry, nuc or synology.
#6 a very different idea?

I hope I haven’t forgotten anything.
Have a good start in 2024!

Oli

2

Hi @Olitepi,

There are (as always) several ways for achieving this in HA, two of which come immedialtely to my mind:

  1. Create an Input Button and trigger the lcn.send_keys service to execute some action assigned to a LCN module’s button (e.g. trigger the LCN button action which is programmed to close all covers).
  2. Configure each single cover as an LCN cover. Then create a cover group to monitor and control the combined state of all covers.

Please note that it is not possible to react to the triggering of an LCN hardware button. This is a limitation of the LCN system as it does not send status reports for button triggers to the bus. However there are several workarounds like programming virtual relays or send_keys commands.

I personally use a very cheap MiniPC (~100€, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD) with Proxmox installed. The HA Operating System then runs on a virtual machine. I do not have any cameras or other computationally intensive integrations/applications so I have plenty of ressources left. In addition Proxmox offers backups for your VMs out of the box.
I used a Raspberry Pi 4 before, but since I have the MiniPC I would never turn back to it. Random crashes, SD card failures, heat problemens, difficulties finding working SSD adapters and electromagnetic noise from the USB3 ports (which causes interference with Zigbee adapters) drove me up the wall.

Andre