As of 2022 of this writing, I wanted to know what’s the right raspberry pi I should buy as a smart hub for Home Assistant. There are variants of raspberry pi out there from 1 to 4, 3B, something like that and I wanted to find the right model for HA. I also needed a zigbee dongle usb stick or z-wave to get my supported smart home devices to work. I hope I can find a good raspberry pi for my smart hub thanks!
If you only want a raspberry pi I would recommend the 4 for future proofing. But I needed more from my hub and changed over to a NUC.
Maybe the Home Assistant Yellow is something you would like. As it is based on the Raspberry 4 compute module and has Zigbee and Z-wave build in.
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Problem with the Yellow is that you have to source a CM4 yourself when you want it delivered this year.
And the CM4 are a bit hard to get.
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You’ll get a range of opinions on this. I think it depends on how you want to use HA.
I have a RPi 3B+ and I’ve never been able to slow it down. I use about 50% of available memory and 13% CPU. I run HAOS. I have lots of Zigbee devices and a number of WiFi devices, along with some GPIO sensors. I do a lot of monitoring and quite a few automations. I don’t stream video or audio. I don’t integrate with any voice assistants. I don’t do presence monitoring or tracking.
I don’t see myself adding any significant functionality to HA in my future, so I don’t see future-proofing as an issue. If I ever upgrade my security cameras or NAS, it’ll be on a dedicated device, not the box running HA. I think this is a critical design decision. Sure, you can load your device running HA up with all kinds of additional functionality. But each addition exposes you to potential problems every time you update anything. Just read all the problems reported in each HA version update thread. It’s really nice to skim them and say “I don’t use that - so that problem doesn’t apply to me.”
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My suggestion is to get an Odroid N2+ with 4GB RAM and an 128 GB eMMC disk module. Here’s an example link on ebay for the bundle.
It is the system that was the basis of the Home Assistant Blue
If you are going with a Pi - go for the Pi 4 but use an eMMC disk module - not an SD card.
The model with the highest potential specification is the Raspberry Pi 4 , so for many general purpose projects this is your best bet. It’s the most powerful Pi, with a fast clock speed, the most RAM available on a Pi yet, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and the ability to run two screens at 4k resolution.
If I was starting up I’ll go for the yellow