I’m new to this forum and want to set up a smart home system. So far, I only have a few Wi-Fi smart plugs that work with the Smart Life app, but now I want a proper system – ideally based on a Raspberry Pi 5.
My Requirements & Goals:
Raspberry Pi 5 as the central hub running home assistant.
A case that can accommodate at least the Pi5 and a SATA SSD which I already have (unless an SD card is now reliable enough)
Wireless standard: I’m undecided. ZigBee seems interesting, and I already have a few ZigBee door and window sensors. However, since the Shelly Gen 4 with ZigBee isn’t available yet, I’m open to alternatives (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, etc.).
Multiple protocols? I wonder if it makes sense to use multiple wireless standards at once or if I should focus on just one.
Coverage: My apartment is 150m², with the Raspberry Pi located in one corner. One challenge is the garage, which is on the opposite side of the house and one floor below.
Planned Smart Home Features:
Lighting control using in-wall modules
Door and window sensors for monitoring
Electric roller shutters: I plan to retrofit manual roller shutters with motors. If anyone has good advice on how to install them (not just which motors to use but also how to integrate them), I’d appreciate any tips.
I’m looking for recommendations for Raspberry Pi cases, experiences with different wireless standards, and insights into how others have set up their smart home with Raspberry Pi. Feel free to share product links!
If you already have a RPi 5, I would recommend using a m.2 NVME SSD. There are many expansion boards that you can use to add the m.2 NVME functionality. The NVME drive will be much more reliable and performant than other options, for not much additional cost.
Here is the PCIexpress NVME expansion board I am using on a RPi 5.
Along with this m.2 NVME drive.
This combination actually fits inside the official RPi 5 case.
However, you may want a case that offers better cooling options.
Welcome! One of the many beautiful things about HA is its flexibility. So don’t worry today whether your Pi is what you want for the long run. Lots of folks here started on a Pi, got hooked and grew their systems, then easily upgraded the hardware to a NUC or something more robust. So cross that bridge if and when you get there.
Another fantastic feature is HA’s interoperability with so many different protocols. So again, don’t worry if you have a mix of WiFi, YoLink, ZigBee, or whatever. The only caveat to that is systems that build a mesh, like Zigbee and ZWave, get stronger, more reliable, and further reaching the more (powered) devices you have. So there is some benefit to growing those protocols out with multiple devices over time. But if you find that perfect Wifi device from Shelly or whatever, go for it!
Finally, these forums are gold. Search here and read a lot. Then ask questions and folks are more than happy to help.
I started on a RPi 4B and once I started adding devices to my home, automations, scripts, addons, etc. I eventually outgrew it and graduated to a virtual machine on a dedicated server in my home.
One of the great things about Home Assistant is that the backups are incredibly robust - you can move your installation to new hardware quickly and easily. So don’t feel like you’re locked into an RPi - you’re not!
It really depends on what are you planning to do with HA, in general audio and video processing needs good resources and intel cpus are normally more powerful than arm ones, at the cost of more power usage.
In your case, for what I’ve read, it seems that the pi in enough for now.
In my view as you’re starting you need to focus on what you’ll lose if HA is unavailable for a long time (HW problem, botched upgrade etc).
Your home “vital” systems should (must) have a failback procedure. In my home every light can be switched via software AND via hw button.
My thermostats are independent devices “smatrified” via integration but can live independently from HA and so on. I wouldn’t leave any critical statem in the hand of a piece of software that I wrote / customized.
It’s not that I don’t trust HA but I don’t trust my usage of it and my usage of the device that host it…
I would use that NUC instead of a Pi as you already have it.
I have my HA instance setup in a virtualbox VM setup to auto boot when the nuc powers on and is at login screen, a NUC5i7RYH installed into an Akasa passive cooled case to keep it silent.
That NUC will work just fine to host Home Assistant - it appears to be more powerful than an RPi and those run it just fine as well.
As others have said, it’s less about Home Assistant itself and more about what you do with it. The more addons/devices/automations you start to add, the more chances you will need a more powerful server. For example, I would not run InfluxDB/Grafana on that NUC.
Why not? I run HAOS on a HA Yellow (originally with a RPi CM4 and now a RPi CM5) with a 1TB NVME SSD. It handles multiple add-ons like Node-RED, InfluxDB, Grafana, ESPHome, NUT, Z-WaveJS UI, Zigbee2MQTT, Matter Server, etc. with no issues whatsoever. The only reason I upgraded to the CM5 was to improve ESPHome compilation times.
Surely a NUC could easily handle the same workload?
I found that Influx/Grafana ran poorly on my RPi 4B, but that’s just my experience, and may have been down to how I had it configured (retention settings, etc). I don’t see any technical reason why you couldn’t run those addons.
