After running HA as a POC for a few months, i have decided that this is certainly the way forward to me.
I do have a lot of older smart plugs which have I’m not happy with, and these will be replaced as and when they fail or cause any issues that i refuse to deal with anymore.
Again to future proof, i would like Matter over thread.
Im seriously considering the HA yellow with PoE support. But not ruled out other alternatives.
Currently in the UK i can not find a HA yellow with the PoE add on, and also i would prefer to future proof a little with a CM 5 that has 8GB ram but may end up with a 4GB model as the 8GB one has not been released.
Anyway as im on hold at the moment waiting for stock i have 2 main questions.
Apart from a mini PC would people recommend i go with the yellow or build a standard PI up. Does anyone have any pros and cons?
How easy is it to migrate from a VM with HAOS on it to a raspberry PI. Am i starting again from scratch?
You should be able to just create and export a backup with everything and restore it on the new system, just make sure the new one has the same assigned IP as the original for, then you can decommission the old setup.
If going the Pi route make sure that you invest in the m.2 hat for it so that you can use proper ssd’s instead of an sdcard for the main boot and data partitions.
As for matter over thread, I would only look at that if you already have a thread border router or co-ordinator that supports it, my experience with it so far was that when I did a restore from a snapshot the configuration that I had saved in a working state broke, that said I was and am using a GL-S200 at the time and it may be something that only affects when restoring from snapshots with VM based setups. (I have yet to retest if the same happens when trying to restore from a backup file instead).
You will want to invest in matter over wifi devices if they fit the need as all it needs is to see the matter server instance that is setup in HA and I have not had issue with that or zigbee when it comes to restoration of the same snapshot.
Since you are also just getting started, when it comes to devices, stay away from tuya wifi based as they require a constant internet connection to work unless you manage to get tuya-local/local-tuya or are willing to go to the effort to try reflash them. tuya zigbee is proper local only.
You also want to make sure that for the primary mesh protocol you go with that you have plenty of devices that can act as routing based on where you setup the end point ones to allow proper signal strength back to the co-ordinator you go with and its placement. This is the one thing that folks tend to forget about and wonder why they have some issues with devices not reponding or not reconnecting after being setup for the first time.
Sorry long winded reply but wanted to cover most things here.
Great I was hoping that the backup and import may work. I plan to keep the same IP and will just power off the VM and disable it. That way I have a backup.
I started several years ago with cheap plugs that initially worked with efamily home, and then when that failed I imported to the tuya app. The plugs are ok, but a nightmare to put into pairing mode. Also as you say they do not work without an internet connection.
Currently the thread board router is one of our Alexa devices. I only have one thread device which is a motion sensor. The smart plugs will start to be replaced very quickly.
My main objective now is to simplify things for my wife should I be away from home so I wish to move this away to its own hard way that I can ask her to unplug etc. it will also remove a fear that any future failed upgrades on my unraid server, will stop all the automations.
If you get a Yellow, your life will be much easier if you get get a CM4. The CM5 is still “early adopter” phase for that hardware, and it really isn’t going to give you anything over the CM4 for quite awhile. It’s easy enough to change out the CM board in a couple of years if you really want to.
If you do get a CM5 for the Yellow, absolutely do not, under any circumstance, use the screws to screw the CM5 to the Yellow. You will break the CM5. The screws aren’t needed, and they aren’t even mentioned in the instructions, but other CM5 users have used them anyway and reported that one of the screws cracks a resistor on the CM5 (the CM4 layout didn’t have this problem).
I started considering going with an N100 based device yesterday, however I discounted this and Had the yellow been in stock I would have literally bought it last night.
But today that has changed. After discussing a use case scenario with my wife, we are going to venture into AI using the coral ai usb adapter. I understand the yellow will not have the power to run the adapter.
Anyway I have placed an order for the following kit.
Beelink N100 16gb ram, 500gb storage.
Coral ai usb accelerator
Home Assistant Connect ZBT-1
I’m now deciding between running haos bare metal, or using proxmox.
This is now going to consume more power than I wanted, however I can port some stuff I’m running in docker on my current nas setup. Both bare metal using add-ons or running a docker VM on proxmox are options.
Currently I’m 99% sure I’m going bare metal due to proxmox reboots may allocate usb hardware differently causing issues, the whole reason for moving this to hardware, was to reduce the complexity and risks I have running this on my unraid nas.