I’m about to start my first ever Smart Home project and after a lot of research I’ve chosen the HA platform. I don’t know if this post is in the correct category. Admins, feel free to move this to the correct category.
First a little background information about the project. My girlfriend and I are building a new home which has to be capable of becoming a Smart home. Therefore I’m studying the floorplan to be a much prepared for the future as possible. I’ll be sharing the floorplans as soon as possible because suggestions and insights are very welcome!
Construction will start in April 2020 and they expect construction to take 14 months. So I’ve time to think things through.
Smart Home Goals
Building the most reliable HA Smart Home possible with the most reliable hardware
Apple HomeKit compatible
Future proof (I know this is very hard to accomplish)
Smart Home Automation Project Setup
Infrastructure
200m CAT7 UTP Cable
1x Cisco SG110-16HP (10 Gigabit Ethernet With PoE and LACP Link Aggregation)
1x Linksys Velop Tri-Band Multiroom WIFI (3 Stations)
Hub & Bridges
1x Synology DS718+ NAS (Running Home Assistant, Surveillance Station and Plex)
2x Philips Hue Bridge
1x Apple iPad Mini 4 (HomeKit Hub)
These hardware products are to kick off the project. I’ll divide all other purchases into different phases so it’s manageable for me. Please feel free to comment and discuss with me about my hardware choices.
My 2 cents because I too am designing from scratch with a key being “Future Proof”.
Consider anything that relies on a 3rd party service to be non-future proof and temporary use.
How long will Apple maintain HomeKit? For the next 50 years? I’d be surprised if it was still around 10 years from now.
Same with Philips Hue. While the bridges work offline (from what I understand, I don’t use Hue) what happens when Philips pushes a firmware update to remove the local API?
And both those components, don’t they rely on WiFi? 30 years from now, will the WiFi spec still allow connection from B, G or N devices?
Not familiar with Velop, but if it is anything like the other consumer oriented mesh solutions, they rely on a 3rd party. When Linksys decides to shut down Velop, does your WiFi still work? Can it be managed?
Hue bridge can only handle 50 devices (incl. sensors). And things are adding up very quickly. I won’t start with 2 bridges obviously but I’m making up the inventarisation.
My two cents on running plex and other services on a NAS (I also have a synology, less powerful tha yours though) : Transcoding can put a huge load on your NAS, and things can get quite slow in HA during the process.
If you’re running other services alongside HA, this will be even more of a burden. I’d advise to get another unit (I’m using an intel NUC for that, it works flawlessly) appart from the NAS to run what’s needed. Use the NAS as a backup station in case anything goes wrong.
I also wrote “future proof” a bit carefully because nothing is really future proof of course. Well let’s say I want things to work for at least 5 years from now.
How long will Apple maintain HomeKit? For the next 50 years? I’d be surprised if it was still around 10 years from now.
Apple is just getting started with home automation. I think it’s more alive 10 years from now. But then again I don’t want to rely on HomeKit as my main hub. I only want to be able to use Home Assistant with Siri voice commands.
Same with Philips Hue. While the bridges work offline (from what I understand, I don’t use Hue) what happens when Philips pushes a firmware update to remove the local API?
Never say never but a big company like Philips can’t do that to their costumers. I think betting on large companies with a lot of consumers is the best thing to do when it comes to future proof.
And both those components, don’t they rely on WiFi? 30 years from now, will the WiFi spec still allow connection from B, G or N devices?
30 years from now? Wow! I would like to start with 5 years from now
Not familiar with Velop, but if it is anything like the other consumer oriented mesh solutions, they rely on a 3rd party. When Linksys decides to shut down Velop, does your WiFi still work? Can it be managed?
The Velop line from Linksys is indeed a mesh network but I don’t depends on a external Velop server or something. It meshes the 3 devices together, nothing more. And it does by using another frequency to communicate with each Velop device.
So you’re saying that running HA on a different unit is more reliable?
I don’t know much about the NUC. Can you provide me with some information about the device in combination with HA? And an Amazon link please? Maybe I’ll change my mind. Thanks for your input!
So you’re saying that running HA on a different unit is more reliable?
Depends on how you run things and your skill level. If you’re confident that you can run your HA instance while tinkering with other services on the same device, without messing everything up, then you might be good using your NAS only.
As for me, I’m still in the early days of learning how all this stuff works, so I mess/trash/reset things a lot. I want my NAS to remain as clean as possible and avoid running software that I might get rid of after a few experiments, this is why I chose to get a NUC (appart from the perf boost, but it’s another subject).
To be honest I never had that much of a problem, but for example I had several issues with nodered eating up 100% of my CPU (because of an error I made of course), which led to ALL of my services crashing or not responding. Lesson learned.
One other thing to consider is that synology DSM might induce limitations on what you can/cannot use. I’m pretty sure there’s an easy way to run docker with it, but you might get limited in other ways.
Anyway, those are only my two cents and I’m in no way an expert on the subject. But if you are just beginning to get into iot and HA, this might be relevant for your case.
As for NUCs, those are quite handy little devices with a good ratio between perfs and price. Mine’s been running for month whithout issues. Have a look at this website first.