get data from my solar system (inverter Is made by SolarMG): Energy production, home consumption, battery, etc.
connect some air conditioning; a Samsung trial split that has Smartthing protocol and 2 older Daikin , I ll need to buy wi fy adapter for those
get data from the thermostat (made by b-Ticino) of my heating system
control and view 3 IP cameras connected tò my LAN network
get data from by allarm system (I ll need to buy a WiFy adapter), tò know fro example if the allarm Is ringing
I have 2 main targets:
tò manage the Energy surplus production. For example tò switch on the air conditioning if the battery Is full and I have a solar production bigger than my home consumption.
to have a classical videsurveillance system, so tò check the cameras by remore when I m out, or for example tò record video on cloud if the allarm is ringing
Which HW Is suitable for my case?
The Home Assistant green Is enough?
Or may better tò buy a MiniPC? Window or Linux? Which features?
I have a classical NVR with cameras. Recording continuously.i have frigate setup to monitor some of the cameras and alert me when they detect motion just saving a snapshot to HA. Motion detection on NVR turned off or ot will alert me every few seconds.frigate runs on an intel nuc.
Hi
Hi hava both the 2 options, because I have a NVR that I could.reuse.
But I don t Need so many fea,tures, I Need Just tò have a look tò cameras when I m out and May be to record video il the allarm Is ringing. I don t Need motion detection with AI or any other sophisticated features.
So I don t know if HA Is enough for that , May be without using the NVR.
But the big question Is which HW do I need
Perhaps you could elaborate on the alarm you mentioned.
A second hand mini pc could cost as much as a HA green and be more versatile but a little bit harder to setup.
I’m a big believer in using the right tool for the job.
HA is great at a lot of things like monitoring and automating your home. There are other products, some open source, equally good at managing security camera data.
Having those two systems talk to each other is a great idea. Shoe-horning a whole video surveillance function into HA doesn’t seem like the ideal solution.
There is no single right answer here. There are more than a million installations of Home Assistant around the globe, but I would bet a lunch that there are no two alike.
The biggest determinate is: will it grow?
I have 9 cameras on Frigate running on its own Intel NUCi5. It connects to my Home Assistant through the Frigate integration.
My Home Assistant is running bare-metal on an Intel NUC i3. I had formerly been running Frigate as an add-on but nine active cameras were just sucking up too much RAM.
What to start with? Most people use the Raspberry Pi4 or Pi5 as their first Home Assistant host computer. If your video surveillance is on a stand-alone PC, then the Pi5 can easily handle all of your other requirements. As you fall further down the rabbit hole the Pi5 will be more and more sluggish, or even memory constrained. If you haven’t purchased anything yet, I recommend buying a used Mini-PC like the Intel NUC, Beelink or similar. You can often find a good used NUCi5 on eBay for less than the cost of a new Raspberry Pi5.
The good news is, if you already have a Raspberry Pi4 or 5, go ahead and use it to get familiar with Home Assistant. When you outgrow the Pi, migrating to another host PC is as easy as backup/restore. Don’t try to do everything, everywhere, all at once.
Keep it simple. Just install Home Assistant bare-metal on your host PC. Avoid Proxmox, Docker or VM’s. Skip the additional learning curve. Bare metal avoids USB or Network pass-through issues and no managing disk or memory allocations. The downside of bare metal? Your Home Assistant host computer is just that. Dedicated to one task. It just works.
If you need to run other programs on your Home Assistant server that aren’t available in an add-on, migrating to ProxMox can always be a solution later.
Hi again and thank you tò all. @steveman: no, the num of cameras will not grow
summarizing all the replays, if I understood, I could use the NVR for the videos, and if possible interfaced It tò HA,
then buy a MiniPC for HA, Better than HA green.
I understood that the HA OS overwrite the MiniPC Os (Win or Linux), therefore May be Better tò buy a Linux One and avoid tò pay the Windows license, correct?
If you plan to make the MiniPC a dedicated HAOS server, then you will overwrite the OS. If you buy used, then it doesn’t matter. I would not buy new. I have purchased six used Intel NUCs on eBay, and they are all working just fine.
If the OS is on an M.2 or other removable SSD, then just buy a new M.2 or SSD for the Home Assistant OS. Save the one that comes with the Mini PC. If you move to more robust hardware in the future, just pop the old boot device into the computer and it’s back to the way it was when you bought it.
Also, the easiest way to flash HAOS to an M.2 SSD is to use a M.2 to USB adapter, then flash the X-86 image to it using Balena Etcher.
Thank you for the suggestions
I Just bough a Mini PC Intel NUC i3-8109U, 16 GB di RAM, 250 GB SSD, Windows 11 Prof, used, on e bay
When It Will arrive I ll try than tò install HAOS
I ll cross the finger
Ciao
Fausto
Since it has 16GB RAM and HA does not need that much, you have 2 options.
I would ditch W11 and either install HAOS on it and use apps which run ‘on top of HA’ (HA has to run for them to be available).
Second option: install Proxmox, install HAOS in a VM and run LXC’s for other stuff.
This gives you a very flexible option, regarding tests/backups, and running a lot of other services separate from HA, though it’s a little extra learning to do but a lot of fun and possibilities.
To give you an idea: I’m running Proxmox with HA and currently Wireguard (VPN), Docker, PiHole, LMS (music server), Nextcloud (mainly for calendars), ESPHome, Zabbix (monitoring), DokuWiki, Grafana (Long term statistics and graphs), Zoneminder (NVR), Paperless NGX (document management), Jellyfin (media system for video), Zigbee2MQTT (so I can still control stuff IF HA would be down) as LXC (containers) and a W11 as VM.
But: my system has 32GB of RAM.
There is also a lot of info here on the forum about Proxmox since it’s quite popular.
Once you have Proxmox running, which is quite easy, you can benefit from the proxmox helper scripts which make it really easy to get you started.
The i38109 processor was only used in two NUC models, NUC8i3BEH and NUC8i3BEK.
Both are quite sufficient for use as an HAOS host. The only difference is that the BEH is taller and has an internal 2.5-inch SATA slot.
I’ve never tried it but in Home Assistant: Settings → System → Storage, you may be able to tell Home Assistant to use the 2.5-inch SSD for Backup, Media or Share. Basically, a redirect from HAOS default folders.
(Now that I think of it, I should try using it for Backup since Home Assistant backups are first stored locally then moved to your backup destination.)
By the way (I just learned this myself). Intel NUCs ship with OEM Windows licenses embedded directly in the UEFI firmware. This means that you can install HAOS, Ubuntu or any other operating system and later install Windows again. Windows will automatically reactivate with the digital license stored in the NUC’s UEFI. This means you can install HAOS on the M.2 boot device and if you want to repurpose the NUC as a Windows machine later, you are safe.
When you get Home Assistant installed, three must-have apps (add-on’s) are “Advanced SSH and Web Terminal”, “Samba Share” and if you have an NAS, “Samba Backup”.
SSH allows you to get to the command line of HAOS from your PC. You may never need it, but when you do… Samba Share lets you see the HAOS configuration folder in Windows File Explorer.
With these two installed, you may never need to have a terminal on your Home Assistant host computer. My Home Assistant server host computer (an Intel NUC i3) is in my basement, and I can’t remember when the last time I connected a terminal to it. Samba Backup lets me save my backups on my NAS. If you don’t have an NAS you can install the Google Drive Add-on to save your backups to your Google Drive.
An odroid N2+ with 4G RAM and 64G EMMC is the best platform for HA controller based on cost, power and performance.
A Frigate docker container running on a separate Linux box for video processing. There is a frigate integration that run on HA that communicates with the frigate container. HA can then send alarm alerts based on objects detected by frigate. My system tells me when people/cars are detected in area’s they aren’t supposed to be. It lets me know when the mail man is at the mailbox. There’s an HA blueprint “Frigate Notifications” that handles the alerting.
Emporia Vue 3 for power monitoring, if that’s what you’re trying to do.
This picture show the three platform architecture I use.
Odroid N2+ running HA OS
Raspberry Pi running things I need on battery backup but can’t be ran on the HA controller. This post explains what I do with this extra box.
A bigger server to run containers for things like frigate, voice processing, etc. that isn’t on backup power.
If you are not concerned about getting alerts during power and internet outages you can place all the above on a bigger Linux box, running HA OS as a virtual machine.
