I’m currently running HA on Raspberry Pi with a deconz (zigbee) and a z-wave dongle.
I would like to setup a new instance for my mom’s house. I will only use zigbee devices there. Is this still the simplest way to run HA? Or is there a different hardware setup that I could use?
Might be the simplest in terms to setup but for something you are probably going to have to manage I wouldn’t use one.
I am in the process of building a system for my father and picked up 2 Intel Celeron mini PCs (lenovo) from eBay with power supplies 4 gigs of ram and 128g SSDs for $200. I am running the exact same image on both so if I make a change on mine I can make the same on his and know it works. No SD card worry, and after getting the Pi and SD card and power supply, and probably a case you will be close to $100 already.
Sounds like an overkill for what I want to do. If this is the case, I prefer the Raspberry solution (max 100 EUR including the zigbee dongle), unless there is something else to consider.
That may be fine or start, but over time, if the deploy grows (lets say you want to add some camera’s for example) you will quickly start to max out the pi, unless this is a beefy RPI4… in which case you should be ok…
Regardless of the hardware you use, you may find it easier to maintain by running Home Assistant in Docker. This way, backups, restores, and upgrades are very simple. And, because it’s docker, you can fully test at your home before sending it to your mom’s device. Additionally, the host operating system gets reduced down to almost nothing (just SSH and docker, nothing else needed) so the likelihood of there ever being a time that you make a change leaving the device unable to boot and requiring physical access to it to fix it greatly decreases.
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I run rpi4 with usb -> sata case for a kingston 120GB ssd (cheepest one) and a Pimoroni - Raspberry 4 Fan SHIM, official psu and ConBee II zigbee usb dongle.
No hassle with sd-cards failing, install generic hass.io install in docker (unfortunately be sure to have ssd connected to usb2 port otherwise ist gonna interfere with the ConBee). Setup is easy to move around with wifi configured when adding maybee ikea gu10 in a ceiling lamp - the 5cm distance 