What king of device does Home Assistant require to be housed in?
You can buy a Raspberry Pi 4 with 4Gb or 8Gb, or a Home Assistant Green or a Home Assistant Yellow.
You can also buy a PC and install it on there. Many use MiniPCs, like the NUC, and many use second hand ones, since Home Assistant can run on most older hardware as long as it is not 20 years.
Many also use a hypervisor, like Proxmox, Hyper-V, VirtualBox and run it in a VM there, which remove the brand specific hardware requirements somewhat. Just remember to have enough RAM in the machine that runs the hypervisor and know that Windows desktop Oses are not good at running Home Assistant, because it is hard to control when it reboots for updates and the like.
If just trying HA out to see if it’s right for you, don’t buy new hardware. Use something you already have. An old PC, raspberry pi in a drawer doing nothing, even run it as a VM in windows or Linux (don’t worry about rebooting stuff mentioned above if just testing). Once you have decided it’s right for you then think about the hardware and what you want to do. If running security cameras you will want more power than a pi4 can give, it will run OK but you will soon run into issues with a few cameras. Its easy to backup and restore to new hardware, so don’t worry about spending time setting up on some hardware and having to start again if you move to something else.
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