Heyho,
as I will soon move into my first “own” apartment (have lived in shared apartments so far), I would like to set up some smart home devices. Primarily lights, but I am open to other ideas.
Looking into the topic I noticed that basically all cloudless setups need a server - often they use a Raspberry Pie, a low energy protocol - like Zigbee or Thread, and a managing software like Home Assistant or openHAB.
Currently, I think about using the Raspberry Pie 5 (should also be helpful for other projects such as Immich) together with some kind of USB to connect to the Thread network (guess there is something similar like conbee2 for Zigbee) and openHAB as the software for greater customization. While openHAB is probably overkill, as a computer scientist I think I might enjoy the greater customization options.
So my question: Are there any good tutorials for this setup? While I knew of Zigbee before this project, I wasn’t aware of Thread and am just looking into it. I don’t feel comfortable yet to double down on it without learning more on possible ways to connect Thread to openHAB on a Raspberry Pie.
Thanks in advance!
Home assistant is a beast, not sure openhab can actually match it today. Unless you already have a pi5 and a SSD (avoid micro sd card), you could consider a mini pc with n150 (or n100) processor. It doesn’t consume much power (close to pi5) and it will be more powerful and more Ram which will be useful for immich.
Start with zigbee first, much more mature than thread. I don’t personaly use thread but i believe some zigbee dongle also can deal with thread at the same time.
About the setup. If mini pc, you can use proxmox so you will be able to create a VM for home assistant and another one for immich.
Do you have any concrete mini pc in mind? Most I can find are considerably more expensive than the pi.
A pi5 with 1gb ram will always be cheaper but that’s not enough ram for your usecase, search n150 at Aliexpress, you can often find some mini pc for around 150-160€ on sale with n150, 12gb lpddr5 (or 16gb ddr4 sodim) and 500gb SSD. https://a.aliexpress.com/_EQ5k2Uu This one was 153€ couple of days ago. Thay are other Chinese brand like soyo, beelink, bmax that have similar hardware. They are not as good as NUC, but they do the job for way cheaper.