Just made the decision to move my current home set up over to HA. I have around 60 devices in my home (mainly Wi-Fi) of various types. A mix of Nest, Samsung, Ikea, SmartLife, Meross etc… All connected via Google Home and using various routines. My aim is to transition over to HA for better automations, some resilience should the internet go down and ultimately get towards a more customisable set up. I am hoping for different voice assistant options one day, but will probably use Google Assistant in tandem until this matures.
My IT knowledge is pretty good (but probably more DIY geek these days) and I have always been interested in home automations. I now feel the time is right to make the move into the HA world, but have a few questions…
I’m expecting to be a fairly basic user initially, but have decided that HAOS in Proxmox is probably the way I will go, so I have some flexibility to spin up another VM if something changes going forward. I have found this guide which seems recent and simple to follow.
I’ll be using this on an Optiplex 9020 USFF i5, 8GB, 256SSD. Can you see any issues with using this guide for this set up, or would you suggest anything better?
Generally my devices are currently Wi-Fi, but I am going to move more and more over to Zigbee (Proof will be in the pudding, but maybe Matter too). Is the SkyConnect worth getting now or do you think I should go something like the Sonoff (P or E?) and upgrade later if I find myself using Matter?
With the Zigbee set up, what is the benefit of not just sticking with the general stock dongle firmware by simply plugging in and letting HAOS discover it as a controller vs. setting up zigbee2mqtt?
Finally, is there a way to set up Proxmox to boot HAOS, but also into another VM to be shown on screen to run something like a retro gaming console? Appreciate I may need to ask this on another forum, but just thinking something I may want to add later. May be worth running this on a Pi or something though?
Nice to meet you all and many thanks for humouring a newbie!
Shane
Thank you for the reply. Those guides are really helpful in addition!
Do I take it from this that if I were to create a retro gaming VM in Proxmox alongside the HAOS VM, that starting this straight into the GUI is also possible? I.e if I switched my TV to the correct source at any point, the VM instance could be immediately visible whilst HA was also chugging away in the background?
This partially answers your second question. If you want to use Zigbee2MQTT then you should buy a CC2652 based coordinator. The SkyConnect and other EZSP devices are experimental.
The answer is entirely personal preference.
The native ZHA integration has no external dependencies and supports any standards compliant device (which is less common than you may expect), with any non-compliant device requiring a quirk - there’s no documentation to tell you what’s supported.
Zigbee2MQTT has a list of supported devices because by default nothing works. It’s external to HA and has a wider userbase so usually new non-standard devices get supported here first (but not always).
I run Zigbee2MQTT partly because I like having things separate, partly because when I started with Zigbee ZHA was relatively immature, and largely because I like knowing what’s going to work before I buy it.
You access HA from a web browser. You access a retro gaming console from either opening a Proxmox console or from running a remote session to the VM. You have plenty of choices.
Below is an example workspace inside a Vivaldi browser, accessing a Proxmox node, displaying a console of an Ubuntu desktop VM.
