Hi folks. New here but not new to Home Automation. Currently using Smartthings and it’s actually been solid for yrs but I’ll be moving home soon and want to move into Home Assistant. A little unsure on the best way to do this so hoping for some pointers.
Happy to spend around £400-500 for a really good, beefy fanless ( or quiet ) mini pc so if anyone knows of the best ones for HA I’d appreciate any recommendations.
I run blue iris too on windows ( I’m a windows user for my sins ) so I’d like to, if possible run windows 11 on this new machine and i believe it’s best to run HA within a virtual machine within my windows pc, is this correct? I’m hoping this would allow me to install blue iris and some other programs on the machine too. Would all of this be acceptable to have a stable HA running 24/7.
I’d also need a zigbee and zwave usb device so looking at the new sky connect device though this is only zigbee yes? I only have a few zwave devices so I might just sell these on and get some zigbee equivalent motion sensors instead. Is there any other devices or hardware I need?
If using blue iris this is kinda your easiest choice, other than move to something like frigate NVR and change OS.
Ultimately people use windows VM all the time so you should be fine. Still recommend different OS since VM (and windows) is resource hog and something like Linux+docker run better on that hardware but I don’t think blue iris work on Linux.
I expect your setup will become constrained due to resources and OS choice over time but you will make it work or upgrade again.
Aeotech USB zwave dongle and zwavejsui. This is easiest option for zwave and HA
You can also use zigbee/zwave combo stick or separate and there is a zigbee equivalent to zwavejsui you can run but I forget the name
Thanks. I think the best course of action would be to flash HAOS on the drive rather than using windows. There’s so many choices out there regarding nucs, thin clients etc, my head hurts lol.
I like used rack servers. Honestly anything with a lot of memory and a decent CPU will work.
I would consider Linux and docker. Mostly because you seem like you may run other applications in future or even now. HAOS does this with addons but this can get limiting although simpler to manage for some. You can always change from HAOS so not big deal.
HAOS is definitely better choice than windows in my opinion
After some weeks on HAOS and Raspi I went to NanoPi and Docker. To be honest this machine has so much more power than a Raspi that I don’t know how to overload it. It is running extremely cool, uses only a fraction of power (compared to Raspi, of course even more with a PC) and has everything I need.
Currently this device is hosting lots of other functions, simply because it is running idle. If someday the load would increase, my first step would be to move all the other stuff to other machines - easy, thanks to Docker.
If one day the NanoPi would have significant load through HA and all the associated containers, easy thing, I would just migrate it to a different machine.
Moving a) from Raspi to NanoPi b) from HAOS to Docker was a real door-opener for me. Never looked back.
Intel NUC is the gold standard in micro PCs. I have five Intel NUCs in my server room, all but one were bought used on eBay.
My advice: Avoid eMMC memory. There’s not anything wrong with it as a technology, but it’s a lot easier to flash your OS to an M.2 SSD. It’s also infinitely easier to migrate to a larger SSD if you need to later. Of course if your selected hardware has Windows 11 installed on it, just flash HAOS to an M.2 SSD and boot from that. This way if you ever want to migrate to something else in the future, you can easily turn it back into a Windows PC.
Flash HAOS. Why complicate your installation with a container or virtual OS if its’ purpose is to be your Home Assistant server?
