I’m planning to build several WiFi connected devices for home automation: an AC remote control and air quality sensors. These devices would send data and be controlled through a local server. I’m considering two approaches: running custom software on a server PC (hardware to be determined) or integrating with Home Assistant’s protocols and purchasing their hardware. Would using Home Assistant be excessive for this use case?
I’ve tried Domoticz when my Pi was too old for HA, before upgrading to HA. It was good enough to control only a few devices.
HA isn’t the only option. I think there’s two other open source smarthome solutions out there(?) And you could probably do with just an MQTT broker and a Python script, or something like that…
But HA isn’t a bad choice. They’re doing a phenomenal job. And related projects like ESPHome make it really easy to integrate microcontrollers. And if you want to do more smarthome stuff, it has a plethora of features, integrations, an app…
Extra hardware isn’t absolutely necessary. I have one server at home which does NAS, and I use 4GB of it’s RAM to run a virtual machine with Home Assistant. That’s enough for it, including a bunch of Addons.
If you aren’t locked in yet, I’d recommend against WiFi devices. Check Zigbee or similar. It won’t clutter your LAN and is independent. You usually need some kind of central station for that but it’s worth it imho.
The exception here would be ESP32 devices. These have been some of the most reliable devices in my home and the most versatile, no Internet access required. Zigbee works well, but runs in the same frequency space as wifi and Bluetooth. Matter and thread are the new hotness and run in that space too. They all work well together, but something to consider. Z Wave is in a separate frequency space, but is a less open protocol. I have at least a few of all of these and they all play nice. Consider your priorities and choose what’s best for your application.
ZigBee base stations are like 20€ or so if you get a simple usb dongle
Will do. Is it more for security purposes? Reliability?
Both! Connecting Iot devices to your LAN is a security risk, since they sometimes carry malware. Many DDOS these days are performed by smart bulbs or the like. May even sniff in your network. Of course you can firewall them, but why bother with wifi at all then? Zigbee is pretty reliable and works even if your router goes down (you probably can’t access Home Assistant Web interface anymore, but zigbee light switches etc will still trigger zigbee bulbs, zigbee thermeters will still report their sensor values etc).
I’m a Zigbee user so I use that in the examples but I’m sure the other options are fine as well.
Most wi-fi smart devices use cheap components and will often drop off the network for seemingly no reason. As long as you do some basic planning, Zigbee and Z-Wave are pretty solid. There are some folks here who will say one or both of these technologies are on their way out because Matter & Thread. I’m not sure I agree with them, but even so, HA supports Matter, so… when Thread devices become as ubiquitous as Zigbee & Z-Wave devices, you can replace them as they die.
Most WiFi devices these days are cloud-based, at least on the American market.
If you can find a Zigbee or Z-Wave (or the up-and-coming Thread), those only work locally. The only way to get remote control is to expose HomeAssistant (or a similar hub) to the internet - usually using a VPN from your remote devices into your network.
It’s a bit more upfront work, but no one can track your devices, they’re off grid/much harder to hack remotely, etc.
I’m planning on assembling and coding w/e needs coding on microcontrollers, and a mini PC/HA hardware won’t be connected to the cloud. But generally speaking yes: most IoT devices in the US connect to someone else’s computer these daya
In terms of software, yes. But HA can be run on nearly anything—there’s no need to buy their hardware to use it.
Just be careful with SD cards if you’re using SBCs. Home Assistant does a lot of writing and if your SD card can’t handle repeated writes you may suddenly lose everything. Keep backups to another device and have a replacement SD card ready if extended downtime is going to be a problem for you.
Always run mine in a VM along with everything else, no need for special hardware.
Get yourself a PoE Zigbee and/or Z-wave receiver and you are good to go, can even live migrate HA if you are fancy
I run mine in a VM but have USB passthrough for the Zwave and zigbee sticks. I didn’t know there were POE coordinators. Do you have any you recommend? I use both zwave and zigbee
Booting from USB drives has worked well for me
Adding to this, I recommend a used mini PC. There’s lots of cheap used office hardware out there on eBay that is more powerful, more serviceable, and more flexible than the hardware they sell or a raspberry pi.
Companies are throwing away old hardware (like 8th/9th gen Core i5) that’s perfect for running Home Assistant. See if there’s an e-waste recycler near you - they might let you buy an old system for a nominal fee.
While there are some problems with used minipcs (notably drivers), i don’t think they are relevant if it is only going to be used as a Home Assistant
That’s a good point. This can help me with things like adding a DNS server (I’m assuming pi-hole can be run standalone on a mini PC)
You can also install ad guard home as an add on INSIDE Home Assistant. Works great!
Yep! While I didn’t run mine through HA, I much preferred AdGuardHome over PiHole.
I bought a used mini PC and then set up Proxmox. This little thing is a lot more capable than the Raspberry I used before and it runs my complete home lab, excluding my NAS.
If you’re going to run Home Assistant OS you’d be able to run anything that can run in docker. Some things are available to install directly inside the Home Assistant apps system, otherwise you can install portainer and run any docker capable software.
Yes I run my install on a pi5, upgraded from a pi4.
As others have said, you can run Home Assistant on anything if you want to just test it out. Their own hardware is a great choice though.
But to answer your broader question, yes. Home Assistant is the choice. It works better with literally everything else out there.
HA will connect to almost anything, maybe there is a connector for your AC unit and there are many air quality sensors
My AC is offline, I was thinking I’d just put an infra red LED on a microcontroller in front of it 😅
Even if you build your own thing to communicate with the AC, Home Assistant is still useful since it lets you easily automate things and interact with other devices, and you get a bunch of things included (nice UI, storage of historical data, dashboards, etc). You could build your thing as a Home Assistant integration.
That might depends on how your AC is working, I recently did the same at my dad’s house and run into issues because the temp control for the unit is reading from the remote. So when I sent infrared command to turn off unit, it worked as expected for some minutes then turned back on because remote sent back command as temp wasn’t meet. Still need to do a lot of testing to find a way to make it work, might need to disable remote and use some temp sensors for the triggering part but not sure how that will work, might need to use some hysterisis friendly climate addon for that…
That’s interesting, I’ll have to read more about mine. I think I purposefully bought the “dumbest” option but will need to experiment with it just like you did
I would suggest to go with home assistant. I have been running it for couple of years now and I am very happy.
I would also suggest to purchase a Home Assistant Green. While not needed, you can self install on a Pi or a standard pc, it’s a small price to support the project and the Green is a nice solid and super stable piece of hardware, I am very happy with it after using first an old laptop, and then a Pi. The green is a clear upgrade from both.
Yes. If there’s another open source project that has the coverage I’m not aware of it.
There is also OpenHAB, but I think Home Assistant is the more mature one of the two.
I don’t run a home automation system, but if you want an open solution and are willing to do some configuration, my understanding is that the main contenders are OpenHAB and Home Assistant.
I’d also suggest [email protected] as a more-specialized resource than [email protected], though I imagine that there’s overlap.
Thanks. I thought the already thought out protocols and configurations would make it easier to program the micro controllers to plug in with that rather than building something on my own
It’s been a while since I messed with home automation, but ESPHome was amazing to program ESP microcontrollers (i.e. you most likely wouldn’t have to write any code). You can use ESPHome devices with both Home Assistant and Openhab (using MQTT, IIRC). The last I checked, it was easier to program your own functionality in OpenHAB than Home Assistant.
HA is definitely the largest adopted. OpenHab is probably more geared for developers, but has a more concise and powerful automation system.
As for hardware to run it on: get a cheap n100 Minipc and be done with it. Uses 6-12W, and it’s going to miles.kore efficient for this use than a regular PC.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System HA Home Assistant automation software ~ High Availability IoT Internet of Things for device controllers MQTT Message Queue Telemetry Transport point-to-point networking NAS Network-Attached Storage PiHole Network-wide ad-blocker (DNS sinkhole) PoE Power over Ethernet VPN Virtual Private Network Zigbee Wireless mesh network for low-power devices
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