I renovated my house. I am a hardware design engineer and renovated my house with home automation in mind. ALL switches and ALL electrical connections are wired to my fuse box space. First I used Loxone, but Loxone is not good enough for what I want (or it’s too expensive). I made hall sensors in each door and window which can signal me if a door or window opens or closes (not connected yet to HA).
Each wall socket goes to the fuse box space (many people ask me… wow. wtf are all these cables doing over there?). I try to start with openHAB, but those installations were a mess. Home Assistant is fantastic.
I have a few questions. I started with a raspberry Pi 3 to look at the capabilities of Home Assistant. Linus Tech Tips also pointed me into giving Home Assistant a try. I love it (real time overview power usage with SDM530 and USB to RS485 interface). But these are my beginners questions…
Currently I am using a RPI3 with a 64GB SD card. HA continuously reads temperature sensors, power usage, etc. I’m scared the HA will fail in this setup. SD will get corrupt or something. What hardware platform do you recommend? A fanless computer from AliExpress with AMD or intel processor? Use a SSD or normal HD? Or buy a RPI4 or Odroid? Which storage? The most important things are RELIABILITY and also power usage. So I can count on hardware that (almost) never fails.
I use momentary switches in my home (4 switches from Jung) and they will be connected to the HA-inputs. These inputs must be fast. Fast enough to register single click/double clicks/triple clicks, etc. Making the hardware is no problem (at all. it’s my job). Which hardware can I use for these connect these inputs? Is MQTT fast enough? I will probably not use Wi-Fi, but normal ethernet. So the wires (CAT5 cable from switches) will come into the fuse box space, go into a big metal wall case with the home automation and where I will connect these Jung switches to the digital input hardware.
the power sockets will be switchable and some will have even a power measurement. I will make these devices myself. No normal relay will be used, but I will use only solid state relays (it’s 2023, come on). Which protocol (ethernet wired) can I use for these power outlets? Wired version of tasmota? or a wired MQTT device? I want to use a ATSAMD21 with SPI ethernet probably. Which platform? ESPHome?
Some tips to get going would be great. So mainly I want to know to get a reliable hardware setup for home assistant. How can I connect inputs and what about those outputs? A wifi version to start with is ok, but I must be able to make it with ethernet.
I have an SDM530 directly connected after an old analog kWh meter and connected that to HA with a USB to RS485 converter. I also have a USB to DMX plug and a DMX302 dimmer. I hope that will work, but I’m confident it will. I’m impressed with the SDM530 integration in HA. Great work guys!
Just about any computer from the last decade will out-perform a Pi. An old/second hand laptop particularly will tend to be power efficient and has a built in UPS.
SSD > HDD > SD - SD cards fail, it’s just a question of when
PC > ODroid > Pi - just check the CPUMark of your chosen PC is at least 900 (a Pi4 is about 900)
I’d recommend you handle the reporting of single/double/triple in the switch, not HA. Trying to do that in HA will be painful, and this is how it’s handled in most other platforms.
Thank you both for your replies. Especially Tinkerer for his recommendations. I will go for a fanless mini J4125 PC without storage (don’t trust Chinese storage. no ram buffer, etc. https://aliexpress.com/item/1005002344353769.html). So I will buy the DDR4 RAM and SSD storage here in the Netherlands. You told me to get 16GB RAM, but what about the SSD?128GB or 256GB of 480GB perhaps? I will have to buy the Wifi and bluetooth mini-PCIe card also. Anything that is important? Bluetooth 4 is not enough? BT5.0 or BT5.2 pehaps? Wifi will not be used. Bluetooth wil be used for the Xiaomi temperature sensors.
I will also continue with MQTT for my digital outputs and inputs. I still have a lot to do. Later on I will connect the Misol WH24P RS485 weather station (temperature, air pressure, UV, light, wind direction, wind speed, humidity). This will also be connected with a RS485 TTL converter to a ATSAMD21 controller that forwards the weather information each 16 seconds to HA with MQTT. I think MQTT will be the most important way to communicate with the rest of my system.
I didn’t know Node-RED, but that also seems interesting. I’m a hardware design engineer and have much experience with Altium designer to design PCBs. I didn’t do much programming yet, but I have some experience with C# VS program writer and did some small microcontroller ansi C projects.
Thanks again,
Erik
Check these https://www.gowinsolution.com. They have fantastic solutions from U$ 200-300. They advertise them as firewall appliances but they are also great for domotics. Only thing you have to add is an NVMe SSD (optional as they are supplied with 128G good for testing prior to adding reliable storage). Supplied CPU and RAM is OK and you get a multi-NIC solution in case you want to provide network redundancy in the future.
I would go with 512G SSD NVMe if you can afford it, in case you might want to store media (e.g. some music, some CCTV, energy monitoring, etc). Consider 1T as it seems to offer the best value.
As you are in HW design you might find Node-RED a better fit (flow based programming and can integrate with HA). I think the trio HA + MQTT + Node-RED will allow you to achieve wonders and it will not be difficult to get your teeth deep with your background.
In my case, I actually opted for a used single rack server (Dell Precision Rack 7910) that I found on eBay and installed it in the attic. Also had the presence of mind to install Nvme card which makes it blazing fast. And since it is designed for non-GUI mode it does not have hardware frills that are not needed and comes with Idrac which makes remote administering including OS install a breeze.
In the begininng it seemed like an overkill but as soon as I started adding cameras with RTSP stream, I felt exonerated!
