I have been thinking of making my house smart but I don’t know what device to use if I should use a raspberry pi, home green, home yellow or another device completely. I live in Denmark and the home assistant seems to be compatible with lot of brands here so that’s also why we are deciding to use home assistant.
Hi welcome. It kind of depends on what you think you’ll be doing with it. Do you plan to integrate a lot and spend a lot of time tinkering with the system (these two go hand in hand), or do you expect to use the device for a lot of other things, either related to HA or maybe not at all? Are you thinking about a local voice assistant or even LLM? Are you considering Nabu Casa subscription or not? Local voice or LLM is probably best served with you running it on separate hardware.
We are going to try to connect as many of our smart devices to the home assistant so heating unit, solar panels, lights, etc. We are also considering later on adding voice assistant. But right now we just wanted to know what system is recommend to start. I don’t know what nabu casa is.
Start with device that you will be using for years. Migrating from one to another devices is time consuming and probably not good idea.
In my opinion the best to start with will be pc. Doesn’t have to be a new one. You can buy good used one for a few hundred euros.
Buy nvidia gpu as you probably gonna need it, ssd at least one for start with 512 GB and as much ram you can fit in or afford, at least 16 GB.
We don’t want to have to run a computer isn’t there another way like a nuc or something?
Buy a cheap N100 based mini pc. You can get them from ali for less then €150 euro. If you buy a Pi5 , and add case, SSD, power supply, you want be far off, and the N100 is way more powerful.
Sorry, Denmark does not use Euro, so you have to convert.
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Well there is. I’m just saying from my experience that the best way would be to start with pc. Just because you can realize later that your pi or nuc is to weak, doesn’t have enough space, hard to upgrade…and that you gonna need something stronger.
Thanks for the recommendation but is there maybe a nuc which is sold in Denmark?
Seems amazon.dk redirects me to amazon.de. Just google N100 Mini PC
Something like this? We don’t have Amazon in Denmark portably why it redirected you
Sorry if it’s in danish
That one is a N150, more powerful then a N100, but great for HA. But it does not include ram/storage, so you have to add it.
Okay perfect I think we will try it
A NUC is a good idea if you intend to have a fairly large HA instance and want to run many addons. If you intend to add voice later, you can probably run a small model on that too. A NUC has room to spare. Once you start thinking about an LLM like ChatGPT, you’ll need extra hardware with a GPU - as I said it is better to run voice and LLM on different hardware. I would not immediately buy a device with a GPU, so a NUC with a N100 or even better will do very well.
Nabu Casa subscription is a monthly fee. It will give you many things, among which voice synthesis and recognition (through their cloud). So then you would not need Hardware for that if you trust the company behind Home Assistant not to use your data. That is also why you pay. So they don’t need to sell your data.
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I think what I’ll do is install home assistant on a laptop I don’t use and try it out and tinker with it and then if I’m satisfied with it I’ll then move to a nuc
I ran HA inside VM on my synology for quite a while, then i switched to NUC, since I’ve had a good chance to buy it cheap. The difference is HUGE. I mean - not only when HA runs (that’s lest of a difference), but when you tinker, add, modify, remove… then all runs way faster, from HA restart, to ESPHome compiling…
I think that times of Pi are gone (for a while). Pi has become too expensive regarding it’s (non)power. Any N100 for practically the same price runs way faster.
Perhaps a good idea is to think about proxmox - beside HA you can run quite some stuff on it - (like adguard…) HERE is a list of what you can install on it.
Hello Gabriel,
Welcome to the HA Forum.
This section of the Cookbook has a lot of stuff that might help you decide things.