Raspberry Pi 4 at current house running HA. Unifi system managed on my Dell Precision (Windows 10), does my Plex, Video encoding, hosts all the media, etc.Got about 75 always-on Wifi devices, 10-15 hardwired.
Current HA has boring things like:
Zwave/matter dongle
Bluetooth Dongle
TP Link
Switchbot
Sense Power
Ecoflow Solar
Lots of other fun stuff
Tons of Bluetooth stuff
Thermostat
Harmony Remote
EzViz cameras (10-15 using wifi)
sump pump stuff
hot water heater, water meter from city.
dehumidifer
Tailscale, etc.
My parents will move into House 1.
House 2 is my new house.
I don’t have a NAS, I will have a new Dell machine available to me.
Best options for new Home Assistant hardware setup?
My thoughts are put my extra Dell (it will be an 11th gen CPU) into service with HA OS installed on it. I can snag an 8GB graphics card and put Frigate onto it.
I could even use a cheap camera brand (hardwired or wireless) to use some Automation and detection with Frigate.
I am a building automation (HVAC) Controls guy who loves to tinker as well as “collect all the data”. My wife likes a very moist house so I can use my Levoit Humidifiers and air purifiers to achieve that balance and can show her all the trends. I even have Switchbot from my inlaws piped into our HA portal so I can know when we are about to get dry mouth by staying at their house for Christmas. (we bring our own humidifiers now lol). I would like to also mention, at this new house, I hope to also automate and monitor:
water softener, air filter on HVAC, garage door, possible Solar Hybrid Inverter transfer switch, etc all that solar/power stuff. and someday maybe even get a tiny EV to take the kids 2 miles away to school. I also intend to replicate a water meter (flume) and if I’m lucky maybe even setup the “ticker monitoring gas meter” some people have done before.
I’m getting OpenGradient for basement Air Quality monitoring (Indiana, have allergies and always fearful of basement mold)
I’m thinking of getting the Switchbot Thermostats in each room that give a “dry, good, moist” display on them. My goal is also to eventually setup a touchscreen table with various “health status” of things.
We have 3 amazon echo devices, 1 fire tv, and 1 google hub. Future plan is turning all that into Home Assistant voice assistant. Can’t tell you how many times some stupid kids some “is not available” on Amazon. Just want to play freekin Little Drummer boy and not have 10 minutes of Amazon conversation. I would be hosting all my Media+Music locally (the normal Radar/Lidar/Sonar combination with NZB) so I want future expandability to allow “processing” of voice requests. My limited research suggests the Frigate+LLM+voice assistant capacity means I want to steer away from a HomeAssistant Yellow, Green, or something that lacks above basic processing horsepower. I dabbled in NAS years ago mostly for RAID storage of digital media, but I’m out of that now. I don’t know Unix/Linux firsthand, but have some time following it with friends and family and have done enough “just enough” to probably get by. I want hardware/OS for HA that has an ability to “recover” should it all shit itself, like take a backup and put it somewhere, so if a certain form of OS install locks me to that specific hardware, I may not want that. If anyone has links on how to go about starting this discovery, please let me know and post here. Thanks!
Nice link, thanks! I have heard of Proxmox in the realm of “hosting things”. Any other cool stuff I could host from Proxmox? I did see this article awhile ago about using Frigate and Coral on a machine with Proxmox. So far that does check a good # of boxes of capability. (https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/xzajo0/coral_tpu_proxmox_frigate/)
It’s linked in the thread I sent earlier, but here you go. There’s a couple of hundred things you can install, all with a single copy paste, thanks to Ttek (RIP) and the people who carry on his good work