C) Home Assistant

Home Assistant stand for Open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server.

Home Assistant comes in different flavours and so called editions.

There are three ways:

• Dedicated hardware
• Virtual Machine
• Docker container

The docker container approach has some limitations, like being unable to manage add-ons, which is quite limiting. The Virtual Machine approach can be useful if you don't have or don't want to use dedicated hardware, but it comes with the downside or requiring USB pass-trough for hardware devices like ZigBee/Z-Wave, modbus or similar devices.

I choose to use dedicated hardware because i want my smart home to be independent from my home-server services. In a way, the smart home needs to be operative even if/when my home IT services are down or the internet is not working.

Home Assistant offers different ways to self-host a standalone instance of Home Assistant on dedicated hardware. The easiest, which is also a good way to support the project itself, is to buy a Home Assistant Green or Home Assistant Yellow.

The green is a fully functional hardware with small form factor ready to plug & run. The yellow is quite similar, but you provide yourself a Raspberry Pi4 CPU board.

I choose to self-host Home Assistant on my own hardware. At first i picked an oldish laptop to leverage the low-power conusmption, and the relevant installation instructions can be found here. After some months, after having issues with the laptop battery i decided to switch to an even lower consumpion OrangePi 3B ARM device, the installation instructions can be found here.

As requirements, i can recoment the following:

• One wired ethernet card (as WiFi will interfere with ZigBee and similar networks)
• 4GB RAM (officially, 2GB is the minimm required, 8GB could be preferred, 4GB seems plenty at the moment)
• Any (even small) EMMC/SSD/NVWE. Using a mechanical HDD (on PC hardware) is more powerhungry and using an uSD on ARM hardware is not recomended due to poor uSD overall stability.
• At least one, better two or three, USB ports

You can place this computer in a strategic point in your house, to maximize the ZigBee or Z-Wave rage and signal distribution. You can start anywhere, and then move it if needed, this is specially easy on a laptop where you don't have to power it down.