Sadly, my HA Yellow had some physical damage and I need to replace it… and tragically the HA Yellow has been discontinued so I can’t just get a new one… Can anyone share some advice on computer options that might work in its place?
I have 4 criteria that I’m looking to meet:
I don’t want to have to do any administration of the host computer outside of Home Assistant. With my HA Yellow I didn’t have to do OS updates outside of Home Assistant (HA OS updates just appeared in Home Assistant along with other updates), I don’t want to have to configure or maintain docker or a virtual machine hypervisor or even user accounts for the host computer (as distinct from Home Assistant users). It sounds like this means that I want a computer that can run HA OS bare metal… does that limit me to Raspberry Pi, or are there other processors supported? Etc.
I want 1 large, physically replaceable drive. At least 2TB, but even bigger would be nice. Can be NVMe or a SATA hard disk… whatever as long as it’s durable (i.e., not an SD card) and something very standard that I can easily replace from Amazon. I don’t want to have to deal with managing separate volumes for history or backups etc (and yes I already do external backups too), and something I can literally pull out of the computer and simply swap into a new computer and be ready to go, if the computer hardware ever dies.
Wired ethernet (gigabit or faster).
Reasonable physical cooling. It will have to sit in a closet along with other servers, network equipment, etc. and it gets a bit warm (e.g., high 80’s Fahrenheit). My Pi5-based HA Yellow would run a bit hot, so if I have to replace it, I’d ideally love something with at least a fan.
Beyond that, I’d love a beefier processor (faster ESPHome compiles!) and a smallish form factor (e.g., shoebox size or smaller, not a full-size desktop computer)… I’m ok spending a bit if necessary. My HA Yellow with a CM5 and NVMe happily ticked all of those boxes (except for physical cooling, and if I’m being greedy a faster processor would be nice… but in exchange it was physically tiny and could run off of PoE!), but with it being discontinued and out of stock everywhere, I’m not really sure where to turn. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
Intel NUC / minipc equivalent. Hands down is the best value for your money currently. Pi and anything based on pi lost out on the procs/perf battle a couple years ago.
HAOS is basically the same experience you have now. Install haos, restore backup.
If you have ZWave as the included integration or are coming from haos and use a ZWave JS or JSUI HA app (formerly addon) then the backup includes the ZWave config. You will need to bring your coordinator (usb) which actually contains the network along (the tooling has ways to migrate sticks if necessary)
Not really… Any recent nuc has way more than enough chonk… Just at least two cores. At least 2 GB of ram (because ha base specs are a thing)
Beyond that as big of a SSD as you can afford and as much ram as you can afford. Which rn with ram prices. Enjoy your tiny ram.
Seriously though. This part is all you -base spec is enough. But beyond that… what are you doing with the box? You going to make it a Proxmox node and run a bunch of VMs? Single machine? I don’t know. And at that point it’s you.
Two core, two gigs small SSD is… Enough but… Beyond that…
(mine is a 6 core with 96g of ram and a half TB SSD but it runs HAOS inside Proxmox next to two other vms)
Thanks! I’m checking out NUCs now. (There are a LOT of them… and most seem to be bundled with windows…ugh)
Sorry, I’m feeling like an idiot here — OS management is not my thing —, and I have a few dumb questions:
You guys say any NUC with UEFI should support HA OS. Does that mean I could literally pull the NVMe out of my HA Yellow and stick it into a NUC and boot??? I would have assumed that the different processor architecture would mean that a different variant(?) of HA OS would be required?
If not, then where can I find instructions on how to, um, install the OS or generate a compatible image. I’m used to working with the Pi imager but presumably that does not work for Intel? … and how would I “merge” this new “factory” image with the existing setup from my HA Yellow?
No the yellow is a different Cpu archetecture. You’ll make a backup of current. Yoink the NVME, set it up in your NUC with a new x64 haos image and boot. How to put a haos x64 image is in the main instructions on the HA site… (turn off safe boot.)
And after i plug in the new HA box, will my various devices automatically find it? I can probably persuade my router to assign the same static ip to the new computer, but it will have a new MAC and potentially a new local hostname…
I understand that zwave devices will just happily keep radioing to the same zwave controller (now plugged into a new computer). What about the ESPHome devices? Or matter-over-wifi? Or other local integrations based on MQTT? Do I need to “tell” them in some way that they’re reporting to a new(ish) boss? And how about the nabucasa service that allows me to remotely access my HA? Etc.
If you don’t need too much cpu power (ie: you simply doing standard homeassistant stuff) then used passive! thin clients are the cheapest/best thing imo.
Examples include dell wyse 5070 or fujitsu futro s740 .
Look at ebay for current pricing, though these are usually cheap. I’m rocking a futro s740 myself.
Yeah, hard to pick. I have two of these, but I was shopping for a quiet unit. No problems with it, but not stressing it much. I run Poxmox with HAOS (vs bare metal HAOS).
When you turn off the old box go to where you set the IP and release it for the other box. When restore happens it applies yojr current network settings from backup. So if you had set a static in the backup… Here it comes.
I use a reserved ip on my router. And when I do this exercise I uncheck the reservation and delete the old box in the router DHCP. New box comes up gets an ip… Restore happens. The I go into the router and change the IP assignment for the new box to be my old ha IP *.12.then I reboot the new box.
Which is now indistinguishable from old box. Except new MAC.
I currently have a Yelllow Box with RPi 4 and a SSD of 500 GB (more than enough). My Zwave stops working about once a day and will work again after restarting HA. I somehow doubt that it is because of my current hardware but upgrading will not hurt either.
You’d be surprised… That’s the exact reason I moved off a Pi. All my ZWave slowness and drops stopped when I moved off my pi… I was starving the box for Cpu and ZWave was taking a hit.