this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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Oh boy, that's cheaper than I was expecting startup costs to be... I am oh so tempted now!
With HomeAssistant, as I understand it, it needs the full Pi? I have a bunch of services running on my RPi 4 and so when I've looked at HomeAssistant I haven't been able to install this without touching the other stuff on there. I think they have a docker container version but it has a lot less features.
I have for a while been intending to uprade my stuff to something that can handle photos/videos better, but haven't got around to it. I might need to wait until I do that, then I'll have a spare Pi to use for HA.
I'm guessing an RPi 1B won't handle it. It's running Pi hole at the moment, but I think this is about the only thing it's capable of.
Do you have any old x86 computers lying around?. I am running a NAS serving a dozen docker containers and a VM on an ancient 4th gen intel cpu. I never got into the home assistant stuff but maybe I'll also give it a go! I use PhotoView to share photos with family through CloudFlare zero trust tunnel.
Computers outnumber adults in our house by quite a bit, depending on what you count. There's one in particular that I think would make a good server, but it's a laptop and I can't find the power cord!
Other than that, the Raspberry Pi 4 handles many services just fine, it's just photo/video that are pretty slow (and gets worse the more you use it, so probably thermal throttling - it doesn't have a fan). But it turns out you can run Home Assistant in a docker container and still use the addons by connecting them in other docker containers, so I will give this a go once I get a chance.
I have an unused Pi4 4GB model lying around, I might try run HomeAssistant on it. Sounds like a fun project.
Do it! You might also consider this list of self-hostable projects: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted
I'm running it dockerized as well as I'm using it for other stuff as well, like PiHole, media server, etc. No problems at all.
Some features are missing, like editing config files in the browser. Major gap is that add-ons are not supported. Add-ons are essentially 3rd party apps, like DuckDNS, Frigate or MQTT. It's mostly annoying because the documentation assumes you run the HASS version. But it's no big deal, you can set up those apps yourself. I'm running Frigate and MQTT dockerized and connected to HA without issues.
For docker resources, check out https://www.linuxserver.io/. I used to install apps like NZBGet, Radarr, etc. all directly, which was very annoying as each app uses a different install script. With the docker compose files from linuxserver it was a breeze. I only run PiHole directly, as I saw some issues with the Docker version, the rest is all dockerized.
Ah thanks! I think I decided not to continue when I saw it didn't support add-ons as I thought that would make it pointless, but it sounds like you can run them in their own docker container and connect them. I've used linuxserver.io docker containers before. Thanks for the tips!
Hey hey. Yeah I’ve been toying with the idea of going to a dockerised setup for HA. I run it as a VM on one of my servers and that’s been rock solid along with add ons and the like.
My moto with this whole HA thing was to always do it as cheaply as I can. That has meant a fair amount of building circuits and such myself which is quite a bit of fun.
Also check out ESPHome. It’s great and integrates into HA very well.
Yeah I run HA as a docker container on unRaid, alongside ESPhome. It works fine - have never had a situation where I wished I was running the OS/VM version of it instead.
TBH though, I kinda hate HA; its really kludgy for anything that I've wanted to do, and a lot of the presence based stuff seems super flakey. I'm constantly getting notifications about Frigate events when it knows im in my home area & they're supposed to be silenced.
Thanks for the suggestion, I'll take a look!
I don't think I would know where to start with "building circuits"...
Heh it’s great fun and there are tons of guides. It’s just hooking up wires mostly :). I would call it building circuits I guess haha.
If you want some very specific stuff like height sensors for standing desks (something I still need) you will have to go the self build route. Also to make my dumb alarm smart I have to do some soldering apparently.
That is my next rabbit hole I guess :)