Home Assistant beginners

[Simon42]

Nice! Looks good, PoE is a nice touch too - thanks for the recommendation. £80 a pop in the UK though...about a third of that on rapid delivery Chinese websites though.

Got mine from China, arrived in just under a week.

 

[Poolybit]

Got mine from China, arrived in just under a week.

Nice, I'll check it out. I was going to setup a second coordinator in my network for a garden office so this seems like a much nicer way of achieving that without the extra hassle. Cheers again.

 

[edgedemon]

Personally i'd always go down the VM route so that i can use the hardware for other things, HA doesn't use a huge amount so it seems a shame to lock a NUC just for that

I went the opposite and did a bare metal. I just didn't want the extra complication of virtualization - altho I had a sour taste from a dodgy Bluetooth/virtual box install so probably unfounded.

I went down the VM route too when I outgrew my raspberry pi w/ SSD instance. Helper scripts for promox etc. make it super easy to spin up an instance and it barely tickles the host machine's resources. Passing through USB for zigbee was as simple as a tick box too.

On a powerful enough host device I always go for virtualisation. HA has had some releases that have broken my setup for a while so being able to restore the whole VM back in seconds is worth it.

The other thing I do for an easier life with HA is to use an ethernet based Zigbee controller. Although USB can be passed through I've never found that as reliable (drivers/mobo issues etc) as ethernet based and the ability to locate it in the best location.

Thanks for the replies everyone

Ok then, fun times ahead, Im not too worried about locking up the NUC, but if Im going to experiment I might as well go all in and try virtualisation. Im comfortable with installing Linux, updating packages I wasn't so sure on, but I was reading now that Linux has a package manager which should make things easier. Last time I used Linux was Mandrake and it would have been around the early 2000's and that was me testing it for moving away from Red hat, it has been a while, so this will be a fun little project.

Something tells me this could develop into a proper little rabbit hole

 

[Bluecube]

For VMs I’d use Proxmox rather than a standard Linux install. It’s got a bit of a learning curve but is relatively straight forward to use from the get go. There’s even a script to install HA which requires minimal work from yourself - https://tteck.github.io/Proxmox/

 

[edgedemon]

For VMs I’d use Proxmox rather than a standard Linux install. It’s got a bit of a learning curve but is relatively straight forward to use from the get go. There’s even a script to install HA which requires minimal work from yourself - https://tteck.github.io/Proxmox/

Is that a distro or something more like virtualbox?
From a very quick google it looks like a VM environment/OS, Id rather have the additional functionality of a linux distro.
I might have got this wrong so will have a google later when I finish work

 

[Bluecube]

It’s a Linux based VM environment and a very good one too. It uses the same virtualisation tech as that which you’ll install on a normal Linux distro

 

[Hyburnate]

Just a heads up incase it helps anyone as I was getting pretty annoyed with this for a few hours Recently bought a few cheap athom smart plug V2's to dot about in key areas. It was very hit and miss on setup, sometimes taking hours to detect in HA. Then when updating they wouldn't come back and on power loss they took ages to come back. Would get random drop outs for periods of time.

Anyway I tracked it down to my wifi settings, these things do not like 40mhz wide on the 2.4ghz band. Switched it to 20mhz from 20/40 and they all connect in seconds now.

Please never use 40MHz on 2.4GHz.