This does seem to be a topic that is not very well documented, but I’m giving quite a bit of thought into the design of my desired Home Assistant platform.
What I’d like to ask is basically some validation of some of the design decisions I’m planning and advice on their merits or otherwise.
Firstly - My hardware Platforms
Primary Platform - Home Assistant Yellow - CM4, 4Gb Ram, 8gb eMMC, 500gb NVME
Secondary Platform - Dell OptiPlex Micro 7080, i5, 64GB RAM, 2TB NVME, 4TB SSD, VMWARE ESXi
Processing Load
This was my primary design decision - offload as much of the hard processing to the Dell hardware - specifically the MYSQL Recorder and the InfluxDb and Grafana components.
Am I over thinking this, will any need to separate out the processor load just not be required? - I have found achieving this really difficult to get working. Mainly getting recorder to be able to authenticate externally to the VM I’m running MYSQL on. Plus knowing if the add-on installation creates all the tables, views and indexes or if those are created by the HA core. There is not much documentation on the steps required to use an external database, most of the assumptions are use MariaDB and host it on the Home Assistant Yellow.
Integrations with S-BUS
The 2nd challenge I have is my lighting system - S-Bus. It’s a RS485 bus with an Ethernet Gateway that communicates on UDP Port 6000. It has documentation, but definitely has gaps and I’m going to find it really hard to get an integration to work. I was really hoping that there might be a community of “Home Assistant Consultants” that might be willing to help code the integration for a fee, however I’m finding it hard to find any groups that might know of anybody who makes a living out of writing integrations. The right solution is probably an MQTT set of objects that read the status and then have the ability to then change specific elements in the data stream to trigger switching events.
Does anyone know of anybody who might be able to help?