I’m planning to build several WiFi connected devices for home automation: an AC remote control and air quality sensors. These devices would send data and be controlled through a local server. I’m considering two approaches: running custom software on a server PC (hardware to be determined) or integrating with Home Assistant’s protocols and purchasing their hardware. Would using Home Assistant be excessive for this use case?
As others have said, you can run Home Assistant on anything if you want to just test it out. Their own hardware is a great choice though.
But to answer your broader question, yes. Home Assistant is the choice. It works better with literally everything else out there.
If you aren’t locked in yet, I’d recommend against WiFi devices. Check Zigbee or similar. It won’t clutter your LAN and is independent. You usually need some kind of central station for that but it’s worth it imho.
ZigBee base stations are like 20€ or so if you get a simple usb dongle
In terms of software, yes. But HA can be run on nearly anything—there’s no need to buy their hardware to use it.
Just be careful with SD cards if you’re using SBCs. Home Assistant does a lot of writing and if your SD card can’t handle repeated writes you may suddenly lose everything. Keep backups to another device and have a replacement SD card ready if extended downtime is going to be a problem for you.
Booting from USB drives has worked well for me
Adding to this, I recommend a used mini PC. There’s lots of cheap used office hardware out there on eBay that is more powerful, more serviceable, and more flexible than the hardware they sell or a raspberry pi.
Companies are throwing away old hardware (like 8th/9th gen Core i5) that’s perfect for running Home Assistant. See if there’s an e-waste recycler near you - they might let you buy an old system for a nominal fee.
While there are some problems with used minipcs (notably drivers), i don’t think they are relevant if it is only going to be used as a Home Assistant
That’s a good point. This can help me with things like adding a DNS server (I’m assuming pi-hole can be run standalone on a mini PC)
I bought a used mini PC and then set up Proxmox. This little thing is a lot more capable than the Raspberry I used before and it runs my complete home lab, excluding my NAS.
If you’re going to run Home Assistant OS you’d be able to run anything that can run in docker. Some things are available to install directly inside the Home Assistant apps system, otherwise you can install portainer and run any docker capable software.
Yes I run my install on a pi5, upgraded from a pi4.
Yes. If there’s another open source project that has the coverage I’m not aware of it.
There is also OpenHAB, but I think Home Assistant is the more mature one of the two.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System HA Home Assistant automation software ~ High Availability NAS Network-Attached Storage Zigbee Wireless mesh network for low-power devices
4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 10 acronyms.
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I would suggest to go with home assistant. I have been running it for couple of years now and I am very happy.
I would also suggest to purchase a Home Assistant Green. While not needed, you can self install on a Pi or a standard pc, it’s a small price to support the project and the Green is a nice solid and super stable piece of hardware, I am very happy with it after using first an old laptop, and then a Pi. The green is a clear upgrade from both.
HA will connect to almost anything, maybe there is a connector for your AC unit and there are many air quality sensors
My AC is offline, I was thinking I’d just put an infra red LED on a microcontroller in front of it 😅
That might depends on how your AC is working, I recently did the same at my dad’s house and run into issues because the temp control for the unit is reading from the remote. So when I sent infrared command to turn off unit, it worked as expected for some minutes then turned back on because remote sent back command as temp wasn’t meet. Still need to do a lot of testing to find a way to make it work, might need to disable remote and use some temp sensors for the triggering part but not sure how that will work, might need to use some hysterisis friendly climate addon for that…
Even if you build your own thing to communicate with the AC, Home Assistant is still useful since it lets you easily automate things and interact with other devices, and you get a bunch of things included (nice UI, storage of historical data, dashboards, etc). You could build your thing as a Home Assistant integration.
HA is definitely the largest adopted. OpenHab is probably more geared for developers, but has a more concise and powerful automation system.
As for hardware to run it on: get a cheap n100 Minipc and be done with it. Uses 6-12W, and it’s going to miles.kore efficient for this use than a regular PC.
I don’t run a home automation system, but if you want an open solution and are willing to do some configuration, my understanding is that the main contenders are OpenHAB and Home Assistant.
I’d also suggest !homeautomation@lemmy.world as a more-specialized resource than !selfhosted@lemmy.world, though I imagine that there’s overlap.
Thanks. I thought the already thought out protocols and configurations would make it easier to program the micro controllers to plug in with that rather than building something on my own
