HA provides a lot of great capabilities. Adding things like voice control and music are great, however they are not primary features. The current architecture has you loading all this stuff on the same physical devices. As such a bad behaving add-on or integration can cause your smart house controller to lag or even crash. It would be great to have a primary controller that runs all essential smart house capabilities, and then with another HA install on a second or third platform you could run secondary capabilities. Ideally the multiple platform solution would use a single install code base/install method and the devices would work seamlessly together. If my voice to text capability goes rogue on my secondary controller it wouldn’t bring my smart house down.
This is currently possible and used by many already. I guess making more user friendly would be good.
As far as I know most of the add-ons and integrations don’t communicate via MQTT. I’ve set up the various voice capabilities outside of my HA controller. These work with HA via network level communications. So, while it’s possible to set up a distributed architecture in some cases, my thinking is HA already provides a means to install these things. Why have me set up another OS and a capability that is easily install using HA. It would be great to have a master HA with slave HA devices. Then on install of an addon or integration I could indicate if it goes on the master or the slave. While this would add a little networking complexity, it would make it easier to set up a fully functioning smart house that would result in a more reliable primary controller.
The addons run on a remote HA device
the remote HA relays the device data over mqtt
Any HA using this data just sees the device entity.
A hue light is just a light
A Tesla is just multiple sensors and switches
Addons may separately allow devices to connect over mqtt or IP to make it cleaner but that’s already possible and I don’t think related to HA directly and really not needed ultimately
If you want to run a media server on another hardware, then there is no need to have HA on it.
Use Plex, Kodi, MPD, Mopidy or whatever you like and just have HA control it.
You get a better setup with more freedom and possibilities.
Voice should be modular already, so some of it can be run on other hardware, like a Nvidia Jetson or similar.
In general, I agree with you. My set up is basically a distributed system. My comments come from the fact that HA keeps integrating features into the main platform. The end result can sometimes result in stability issues. I’ve experience this myself a couple of times over the years. So, assuming the development team wants to keep making these additions, it would seem reasonable to do it in a fashion that makes them easy to integrate (which they do), while supporting an architecture that directly provides for distribution of features across different physical devices.
This suggest would provide a great way for people to start playing with new features, say like the voice assistant, without having to worry about the impact to the main functionality.
The integrated features are for HAOS users, who only use one device for everything.
No idea in trying to things like media servers modular, since there are better and more feature-rich alternatives that can easily be integrated into HA.
VAs are somewhat modular already and some of the resource heavy modules can with benefit be run on external hardware.
I would rather see Media Assistant go, since it is just a inferior competitor with the already established media servers.