So I want to take another stab at hassio, as I bought aircon for my new house and they delivered two different model years so different AC units use different apps, and I just don’t have energy to dispute this etc.
In the past I run HA on rPI, it always crashed because of sdcard etc. Updates took crazy long. I looked and the current bundles with emmc are all sold out.
I wonder if it would be possible to run home assistant in OCI always free with VPN, my router can manage VPN and route traffic to VPN by rules. Is this feasible?
Also is there some zigbee gateway that is dedicated and could route traffic to that server for HA?
You could use one of Tube’s network coordinators, but this sounds like a really bad idea overall. If you have any connectivity issues with that remote setup you may find that the mesh doesn’t recover.
You can run HA just fine on any second hand (64 bit) PC from the last decade. My HA runs on an old laptop from 2012 or so. There’s no shortage of suitable systems available from the likes of eBay.
I even have 8gen NUC in the drawer so it is not issue, but for me it is to much hustle, to care for it, but i do respect other people have different experience and opinions, it is not solution for me.
And I would guess each person requirements and usage for HA differs and it the end that also causes different demands on the hw/network setup.
If hustle is the reason you choose one over the other then the NUC will win this comparison by far. There is a really good installation manual for the NUC and a dedicated package. The other route you are comparing with will cause many issues in the future with little support from the community because nobody is doing that.