Hi folks, looking for a bit of steer to get off the ground with self hosting. My goals to start with are pretty straight forward:
- I want to set up Home Assistant to move my smart devices off the cloud and fully contained within the walls of my home.
- I want to set up my own little Pixelfed server for my family’s use, along with some other federated socials.
From what I was looking at, I think my easiest route to doing both of these things is with a Home Assistant Yellow (built-in Zigbee and Thread system) with a Raspberry Pi 4.
I’ve never done anything like this before but I’m interested in learning. If anyone more experienced has any insight or direction, I’d really appreciate it! Cheers!
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tldr: keep your smart home seperate from your services and avoid RPI unless you need it specifically for a project
If I were in your shoes, starting from scratch, with the knowledge I have now, I would avoid a raspberry pi and get 2 computers with an Intel N100 (or N97 or N300). Sips electricity and more powerful than a rasberry pi.
A raspberry pi is fine for lights, switches, sensors, a few cameras etc. But if you are at all interested in one day using the voice assistant stuff, the Raspberry pi just isn’t powerful enough.
I suggest 2 computers because once you have home assistant set up, you’ll want to treat it like an appliance. You don’t want to take down your entire smart home because you broke Pixelfed or another service you get into and have to troubleshoot. Speaking from experience, your family won’t appreciate the smart home not working 😓.
Really appreciate the detailed reply! I understand the logic in separating them from your reasoning! Yes, I definitely would want to stick a voice assistant on there at some point so good to know the raspberry pi would struggle. Is there any particular mini pc that you’d recommend for the job? I live in a small rural Irish village so either way I’m gonna have to order something in!!
I got an Odroid H4+ and have been extremely happy with it. I’m sure Beelink or GMKtec mini PCs on Amazon would also be fine but I wanted SATA ports for harddrives.
If you end up going with the Odroid, let me know and I’ll send you the links to the few things you’ll need to get going
Thanks a million, will definitely look into in and check back in with my progress. Looking forward to getting stuck in now I must say! I think it’s gonna be a fun project!
You should cross post this over to [email protected] or [email protected]
Thank you so much! Really appreciate it, still learning as I’m going :)
Sounds like a solid plan.
Unless you already have a RPi available for use, I would consider basing around x86 hardware. Nothing wrong with the Raspberry Pi’s, it’s just if you need to buy hardware, there’s much more powerful computers available for similar price points. Won’t be as simple or straightforward nor as energy efficient, but if you start adding additional services, you’ll be glad for the extra RAM and processor performance that is available.
Thanks so much for the reply! I think my go to on the Raspberry Pi was that there’s literally place to slot one in on the Home Assistant Yellow, but I’m certainly not married to it! Based off the other response above what I’m thinking I could instead do would be to grab a Home Assistant Green instead of a yellow to handle the Smart home piece to start with at least, and grab a mini PC for the rest. If you have any opinions on what’s decent from the Mini PC side of things, or where you’d trust to ask, I’m all ears as have never really looked into any before.