TL;DR: So basically: in what areas do I save my self a lot of work by getting the hardware I will eventually prefer is 1-2 years of expanding my setup?
I’m starting to build a Home Assistant setup and would kindly like to ask for some advice from you, more experienced people:
When choosing hardware like the computer itself, Zigbee antenna etc., in what areas does it make sense to start out with “overkill” at the time of starting out and vice versa, where is it ok to start out small and upgrade hardware later as needed?
Let me give you two examples, to illustrate:
I can use my existing Rasp 3 but I think I will eventually like to run my HA on a NUC. If I go for Rasp 3 now and buy a NUC later, how big of task is to migrate my HA setup to the new computer?
I have an entry-level Zigbee antenna now but would eventually like to use the SMLIGHT SLZB-06 antennas. How difficult is it to replace this at a later point? Can I just swap the to antennas and the system just works or is it a tedious process of importing all devices to the SLZB-06 antenna, then ?
Thanks in advice for any help - it’s much appreciated
I would buy the NUC and the SLZB now to save myself the hassle of migrating. A raspberry pi 3 is getting old. You can migrate between Zigbee coordinators, but I believe they need to be on the same chip type (ember to ember, zstack to zstack and so on). A migration of HA can be done through backup and restore.
Switching between adapters requires re-pairing, except when :
When the serial.adapter in the configuration.yaml is zstack or ember and the serial.adapter stays the same; e.g. zstack → zstack re-pairing is not required.
There is one exception, when switching from a CC2531 or CC2530 (Z-Stack 1.2) to a CC2652/CC1352 (Z-Stack 3) re-pairing is required.
When switching from zstack → ember or ember → zstack re-pairing might not be required, however results might vary as this is not officially supported.
After switching, check if all devices are working and re-pair the ones that are not. In case pairing new devices is not working, re-pair some routers close to the coordinator while only permitting joining via the coordinator. Pairing should then work via routers that have been re-paired
Not onerous at all. Create a full backup and download it, restore it on the new system.
2) ZHA or Z2M? You may be able to backup your zigbee profile to the new coordinator if they both use z-stack firmware. Otherwise you will likely have to re-pair all your devices to the new coordinator. Better answer above.
It comes down to budgets and what you have on hand at the time. The one advice I can give is start with the yellow or setup HA in a vm either on a nuc or other hardware you can use as a home server for other OS setups you may want to play with down the line.
I run my instance in a virtualbox install on a NUC5i7RYH running w11 (I may convert that to a full esxi or promox setup in the future).
I restored a snapshot at one point due to a logging issue that I had with one build update and I was able to have all my devices still work other than thread based devices breaking (will be retesting in the near future using more dedicated backups of configs and credential settings) due to configs being overwritten and changed between the GL-S200 and HA.
Overall as long as you have backups of your configs to restore you can migrate as needed and as long as they still show up then just physically toggle their state to make sure they show up as online.
Bite the bullet and get a network-based antenna now, before your zigbee install gets much bigger.
Not only will you be able to position it in a more central place, if you upgrade your server to a NUC, you’ll just have to load a backup without having to deal with USB paths/passthrough.
