Hosting Home Assistant

Installation
1

Greetings, I am new to Home Assistant but have used Indigo (Mac user) and Insteon for years. I tried to install and get things working with Virtual Box on a spare Mac Pro that also serves as our media center storage. This unfortunately creates issues of having to share the USB devices with the Virtual Box etc…

With the high price of Pis getting a Raspberry Pi 4 to serve as the host is either cost prohibitive or at best severely delayed. I have a Pi 3 B that I am running RetroPie on but I dont want to give that up just to run the HA server.

Is there a way to Dual Boot the Raspberry Pi and run HA and RetroPie side by side on the same SSD/Hardware?

2

Would docker be better?

3

No, unfortunately its a Mac Pro Mid 2010 so limited to OS X High Sierra. I had to install Virtual Box 6.1 since 7 requires a newer OS.

4

You could (probably…) do that but what would that gain you?

Since it’s “dual boot” you couldn’t have both of those OS’s running simultaneously. So you would have to reboot every time you wanted to switch between the two.

While that wouldn’t be a big deal for Retropie it would completely handicap any home automation system.