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Comment by threatofrain | Hacker News Reader

What kind of hardware do people install Home Assistant hubs on? Does anyone have a good guide to a minimal but clean smart home setup?

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I use openHAB, but they're comparable enough I guess. I have a Raspberry Pi 4 that runs it, with a connected Aeotec Z-Wave USB stick that I have all my smart switches, thermostat, security system, etc. connected to.

The OS is running off a SD card, and despite the horror stories I hear about them wearing out and dying, mine's been running for a couple years now without issue. I've been planning to replace it with a SSD or NVMe drive and USB adapter, but never seem to get around to it.

As for guides, honestly can't remember using any. I just followed the openHAB install guide (I assume HA has something similar) and went from there, DDG'ing and looking on forums for solutions to problems.

i jad a lot of problems at some point with the rPi staying running and the sd cards. i ended up moving them to a differn circut in my house when i suspected that it was overloaded and causing minor brown outs (this was older wiring with the slow trip fuses not a modern breaker)

everything cleared up after that and no problems since.

I burned through 3 SD cards (even "endurance" SD cards) before I finally switched to an NVMe over USB for my HA RaspPi. I highly recommend the switch even if you aren't having card failures. The performance improvement alone makes it worthwhile.

I've had my HA running on an RPi with a regular A1 SD card for close to 3 years now, and my ZWave log file is spammed and my database is 2GB, so not lack of activity.

I did experience some issues initially, but found it was due to a poor USB "charging" cable, it had 1 Ohm resistance! After swapping that it's been just smooth sailing.

I do take frequent backups to my NAS just in case though.

You can see the most popular board types in Home Assistant Analytics @ https://analytics.home-assistant.io/

I think the majority of people use a Raspberry Pi. Personally I use Pi4 with a SSD running Ubuntu. I run Home Assistant using Docker.

I have mine on one of these: https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-xu4q-special-price/

I snagged a zwave dongle to run my lights and it works great.

People run it on everything from Raspberry Pis to Intel NUCs depending on what you wanna do. Some integrations need node, most python, and having a bunch of scheduled scripts firing at once can make the UI a tad slow. If you have a bunch of IoT stuff, I’d probably not throw it on a tiny pi zero for instance.

You can follow these instructions if you’re using an odroid: https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/odroid

I use the cheapest intel NUC I could find, with an old SSD and an Aeotec Z-wave USB stick.

Two somewhat inexpensive NUC substitutes I've used:

a) Asus Chromebox CN60. Under $50 used. You have to open it up to put it in dev mode, then go to https://mrchromebox.tech/ to get a BIOS that can boot Linux. Uses removable DIMMS and M.2 SATA so it's easy to upgrade if needed. Includes WiFi.

b) Older Lenovo Tiny models, like the M72, M83, M93P, etc. A little larger than the NUC form factor, but not by much. You can find them under $100 with an i3 or i5, 8GB ram, and sometimes an HDD or very small SSD. Most of them also include WiFi.

Originally I had mine on a Pi3, but the SD card died. I have a Windows machine that's always on, so now I have HA OS running in a headless VM on there. I went from a USB Zigbee coordinator to tinkering with a separate coordinator that's got a wired connection to the network, so there's no need to pass a USB antenna to the VM and the coordinator can sit closer to the smart devices.

Maybe I'll move to something more container driven in the future, but for now it's been working well for me and I really like being able to snapshot the image before upgrading.

Raspberry Pi 4. Just make sure to use Postgres as your storage backend and disable storage of past events (unless you specifically really care about it). Otherwise it’ll overwhelm your SD card IO.

I run it on my Synology NAS inside a docker container, managed via the command line rather than the web GUI. I know this is not the best solution but since my NAS is on 24/7 anyway and has heaps of spare RAM and CPU, it's the best solution for me.

If you want to buy hardware, get the ODROID N2. It's the closest thing to an officially supported hardware platform in the HA universe. (The ODROID N2 was bundled and sold as "Home Assistant Blue" for a period.)

I do this too. What are the downsides to this solution?

Probably none. But Synology software updates could brick anything at any time.

This doesn’t seem like a likely problem. However moving my install off a Synology and into a vm on a nuc (keeping it in docker) made a massive difference to response times and performance. It’s hard to beat the combo of more ram, more cpu and nvme.

Which Synology model did you move it off

918+. It’s a good unit but I’ve moved to a 1819+ to get more bays, 10gbe and lots of ECC.

I'm running two instances, one on Synology+Docker, other on Odroid (N2+, config like the HA-edition, minus the nice case).

I don't really see any performance issue with Synology (Avoton with 16 GB RAM), just the `docker-compose up` takes a few seconds. Response time-wise, it is fine. Plus, I'm using the Synology reverse proxy, so that one takes care of a few things too.

Of course, Core-i5/i7 will beat Atom-based NAS; but HA doesn't really need that.

Getting it into docker-compose is incredible. I wish you could handle the config files better but it’s very satisfying having it all up in seconds.

I was keen to run it on Docker on my M1 Mac Mini ~6 months ago but, apparently on account of some limitation concerning the way Docker handles networking on M1 Macs - at least at the time - was unable to.

Has anyone managed to get this working? I run a bunch of homelab services as Docker containers on the always-on, power sipping M1 so getting this set up too would mean I could avoid having to use a separate, dedicated Pi.

Once the Linux on M1 becomes available you could run it that way. Right now the issue is that Home Assistant relies on being on the same network (bridged into the container) as the rest of your devices so it can see the broadcasted messages from IoT devices.

I'm running HA inside docker with two networks: one macvlan-based, which is connected to iot-VLAN host interface. Here, HA can talk to devices (this adapter is set in Settings | General | Network Adapters for the broadcast).

The other is bridge (docker net driver one, not linux one) - i.e. it is in it's private, host-only subnet and a reverse proxy running on a host publishes the web app for the users on the main LAN.

Sure, and that works great when you are using Linux to run Docker as you have full control over the networking. For docker on macOS as the OP is using, you only get a single network, and it is an emulated one using vpnkit into the VM. You can't attach a network adapter directly to the VM, which means the docker containers running inside the VM can't see the IoT devices.

I use a good enough NUC with an i7 core. But it runs multiple other services. I have some notes on how I set it up on my old blog: https://blog.braincoke.fr/homelab/homelab-introduction/.

I had it running on raspberry pi 3 earlier, but I have now moved it to kubernetes (k3s) running from my NAS (x64).

I apologize for being a bit late to this comment, but I would also like to suggest that people look into eMMC boards. As one commenter suggested, SD cards are prone to failures (we saw this as Seam and earlier at Sonder!). The Black Beaglebone was a decent choice a year ago. ODroid is good too.

I started with a Raspberry Pi, but as my setup got larger it got slower, so now I use an Intel NUC8 (not just for HA, I run ESXI on it and HA is one of the VMs). My network is predominantly Z-Wave so I use an Aeotec Z-Wave stick to interface with it.

Kuberenetes!

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