Starting fresh after a couple of years of messing up

Configuration
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Before I ask some questions, and in case it helps anyone, I’ll share my epiphany moment and why I really want to start over.

You start out with no idea what you’re doing. You buy what you think a lot of people say (although a lot of other people tell you where the hell are you going with that). You end up with a raspi4, an SD and a Zigbee Sonoff dongle. Then you buy an indecent amount of buttons, switches and sensors on aliexpress deals. You follow the instructions of a random youtuber and when something fails, you move on to a different one, installing another bunch of stuff that you don’t quite understand without uninstalling the previous installation that had failed.

At some point, everything starts to work but you still don’t quite know why.

For some reason, it seemed to me like a lot of fun to keep a database of the temperatures in my house. I still don’t know why the hell I did that. I bought four or five thermometers on aliexpress that never worked the way I wanted, so I have a huge database of practically nothing writing on the SD card of my Raspi4.

Then, as some devices didn’t work at all, I added a zigbee repeater (which didn’t do anything). Then I linked it to amazon. Some things went on wifi, others on zigbee, some showed up on amazon, others only on Smart Life… then I tried to put it all into Apple Homekit and something blew up. Add a bunch of webhooks… and the rest is a horror movie. (You have to look inside my configuration.yaml)

Along the way there was a half-installation of Zigbee2MQTT and random stuff associated with other modules that never worked. From some weeks I get “Unable to connect to Home Assistant” without any notice or reason from outside the local network (although everything still works).

So here we are at this point: let’s start from scratch, for real. Knowing what I do. Knowing what I install. So a couple of questions:

  • What guide do you recommend (youtuber or whatever) that I can follow to the letter? I assume Zigbee2MQTT.
  • Do I need to upgrade the PI4 8Gb with slightly better equipment?
  • Is the Sonoff 3.0 dongle still valid?
  • I’m going to remove the problematic devices (that’s up to me) and replace them with… any particular brand I should look for?

Thanks

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Need ? No. The Pi4 8gb is still capable of running HA, but I would replace the SD card with a SSD.

Yes it is.

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Hi knob2001,

I agree with Francis above if you are happy with performance.

If you are looking to add camera or more CPU intensive stuff (like Ollama AI), I’d look at a PC that you can get to min 8gb with an SSD and it should handle UEFI bios. Next step, if you will…

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Sounds like you’ve been through quite a rollercoaster! For guides, I’d recommend checking out DrZzs on YouTube—his tutorials are pretty straightforward and might help you get things under control. The Pi4 should work fine for most setups, unless you’re running tons of stuff. As for the Sonoff 3.0 dongle, it’s still a good choice, just make sure it plays nice with your gear. For new devices, I’ve had good luck with Aqara and Philips Hue—they tend to be reliable and integrate well with various systems.