Home Assistant 2024 - Which Hardware to Buy + Full Install Guide
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- čas přidán 25. 06. 2024
- The What and the Why on new hardware I chose for Home Assistant and a complete install guide from end to end of it. affiliates - Beelink N95 Mini PC - amzn.to/3xZyQmD Sabrent NVME - amzn.to/3UhccNX or Dell USFF - amzn.to/3wgrOJJ - Beelink Aliexpress s.click.aliexpress.com/e/_DEg...
*UPDATE - Error flashing via etcher? Use this version of etcher, we found that the latest version has problems:
github.com/balena-io/etcher/r...
Kamrui N95 - amzn.to/3WezoPF
Geekom PC 17k CPU Passmark - amzn.to/3Qp1Daz
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00:00 Intro & Hardware Choices
06:52 NVME and Beelink Internals
08:46 Kamrui N95 Internals
09:34 Loading HAOS on the NVME
13:37 BIOS Settings
16:32 Onboarding Home Assistant
20:40 Closing
22:00 The BEST Part!
*UPDATE - Error flashing via etcher? Use this version of etcher, we found that the latest version has problems:
github.com/balena-io/etcher/releases/download/v1.18.11/balenaEtcher-Portable-1.18.11.exe
This fixed my Issue.
This channel is always informative and down to earth. Thanks for this video!
Thanks! Keeping it real and telling it like it is type thing. No paid reviews / projects.
Great timing. Finally ready to make the jump to HA. Was going to get the green until I watched your video on it. Been surfing eBay looking at older HP Elitedesk Minis now.
Of course if you find a better deal on eBay go that route if it makes sense. I like the N95 option for people as I know a lot of people just want to buy something new that they can easily return if necessary and they aren't taking a bit of gamble on. Yet this one doesn't break the bank and still offers great performance.
Thanks Travis.
Such a nice detailed explanation. I like what you did here. Just as it is, no bla-bla-bla ;-) Thanks Digiblur!
Awesome! Thank you so much and glad you enjoy my style.
Using an old second hand i5 NUC, chugs along at 5-10% CPU and has been solid for 3 years so far. I used an nvme to USB adaptor to initially image HASSOS and occasionally pull it and write a backup image in case the drive ever dies, I keep HASS config backups as well but it’ll be up and running again quickly if disaster strikes.
Excellent point! I do this as well on some devices and there's also ways to USB boot backup across the network much like we did in the Norton Ghost days.
Thanks for listing the wattage for each device
I Have a very hard time believing the wattage numbers he provided. I know for a fact that little Dell computer he showed needs a 65w psu, so it at least pulls 30w at idle. Same story for that last piece of hardware with the i7, probably uses a 90w psu. But at US prices of 12¢/KWh it really doesn’t matter.
@GigawattGarage we aren't processing video at full bore on all cores. These are efficient processors
Thanks!
You bet!
Your latest vid on setting up home assistant on an nvme drive was great. Also like the coverage of the Shelly devices I enjoyed also. Keep up the great work!!
Awesome! I have some other HA setup vids of various things I've learned and been using for a few years now.
I went back and fourth on this for a while. Tried it on a mac, then on a zimablade, and then just finally went NUC and installed it bare metal. Should have done the NUC right from the start. Eventually I'll get more comfortable with docker and try something more powerful, but for now this was pretty plug'n'play
Just built one last weekend for the first time. Found docker and absolute nightmare. (Maybe it's just me.) I went hyper V in the end and it was extremely straightforward. If you go down that route, I'll be happy to answer any questions.
Zima stuff is definitely expensive for what it is. Little bit of hype there. These little N95 NUCs have been awesome for the bang for the buck even doing non HA stuff.
You neglected to mention the Dell Wyse Thin Client 5070. I purchased mine on eBay for only $35. It has a fast quad core Intel CPU with 8gb RAM and 16gb SSD. It however has an M.2 slot so for $12.00 more I purchased a 256GB SSD on Amazon. It's very fast in fact I use a second one for my desktop computer as it's as fast as a typical NUC or mini desktop PC. Draws about 4-5 watts and CPU never Hits more than about 10% CPU under full load running Home Assistant. I'm also using a 3rd unit as my home media server with an external 4tb hard drive. Streams movies and audio easily to all my home media devices. These Thin Clients are basically mini PCs and enterprise grade construction bullet proof.
Pretty much the same thing for the USFF/SFF stuff on Ebay. Great deals on those if you dig a little and don't mind piecing stuff together a little.
The downside of the Wyse 5070 is they don’t support NVMe SSDs. As long as you have a SATA based M.2 SSD you’re good to go. I’m not saying it’s a big downside, it’s a great machine, but most people don’t have SATA M.2 drives laying around
I like the new look
Thanks!! Can't go back, that's for sure!
Great stuff, I just picked up some Intel NUC's I5 CPU with 16 meg ram and 128 m2SD , i scored 2 for $40 bucs each. 😁✌
Definitely a steal! What Gen of i5
I'd love to see how you add Z-Wave and Zigbee controllers with MQTT these days. Also, Z-wave smart door locks with PIN codes are a hot mess with Home Assistant. Can you show us how it's done? Locks are a pretty important component of a smart home and Home Assistant doesn't make it easy, especially managing PIN codes.
I will be showing some Zigbee and most likely Zwave soon. I don't have many Zwave items though due to issues I had with interference over the years.
Great video Thanks. Can I connect a touch screen and use the Hdmi?
You'd probably have to use your own OS at that point with a GUI. You could still run HA on it though in a container or VM.
Dude! I love your new style, you fucking rock Stone Cold Steve Austin. :)
Thanks bro!! Love it ! Keeping it real and fun as always. None of that fake crap.
Another option is an Asrock N100DC-ITX motherboard in a small itx case with an external DC power supply. You'll have a RAM slot and a PCI-E slot. And the boards are relatively cheap.
That gets a little pricey for some people for this. Might as well just go with refurb SFF at that point for the same or better performance and save a little coin. It becomes that tipping point if you plan to build a NAS or server too.
Running of a BeeLink but BT driver and wifi not working well with current HAOS kernel. But also with older BT USB adapter I loose frequently connection to my IOT device
I think they had issues with the N100 at one point? But I do remember the devs just saying to go BT proxy with ESPHome as it was more reliable and quicker anyways.
If you use a Blink, don't forget to save your windows license that comes with it for possible future use.
Very true! I have saved some of mine from years ago on things. Some larger manufacturers like Dell have them cooked into the BIOS too which is nice.
just start windows the 1st time, to it 1st setup, activation online, done... then even if you change ssd and reinstall, as soon as it will be online, it will self activate again, no need to save anything, ever done so, once activated, it will be forever... for anything else, "massgrave" exists :D
Great video, on something like the N95, how hard is it to get a google usb tpu frigate stick working, also 2 external spinning rust drives, one for frigate and another as a nas to share media for external kodi machines etc. Cheers, p.s, kids a great shot, handguns not allowed in UK unfortunately 😔
The Google USB TPU is easy peasy. Plug and play. The external drives from what I have seen is not with HAOS. Only network storage at this time is supported there according to the devs on HAOS. Of course if you did your own OS like Debian, Proxmox etc. Then you can control it all.
His first time shooting. Figured we were at the hunting camp doing some mud riding and other work, let him crack off his first rounds and teach him some safety.
@@digiblurDIY You got me into Unraid lol but UK energy prices stink! I'm wanting something a bit lower powered to run 24/7 instead. Archery would be good for him too, also shouldn't annoy any neighbours. Strengthens up some muscles.
You can run those OS I mentioned on the N95/N100 with ease.
We have a BB gun and bow for the back yard with lots of boxes for him as we have neighbors at home. At the hunting camp it's nothing but cows and hogs
Many thanks for the content and you are correct the Beelink is a better choice...It has all that you need and tad more .... And point you missed on the "Kamrui " it has a fan where as the BeeLink does not ... so the Beelink is a lot more quite .... My only gripe with HOS is how big of pain in the ass it is to use the second drive that the Bee has available to install... .. Again thanks for the the work and content
I think the beelink does have a fan. Look on the back in one of my shots, there's fins for the vent. It just idles down most of the time I assume. Now you've got me wondering...let me throw a benchmark test on it to see if will get warm and kick on.
And yes, that would be great if HAOS supported second drives without people having to jump other things but I guess that's when you have to switch.
@@digiblurDIY Go to time 7:11 you have yours open no fan there speak of also when I opened mine I could not see one
See a lot of videos starting with HAOS where integrating plug-ins is easy. How about putting Debian and Docker on a device and integrate NodeRED, MariaDB, Mosquito, InfluxDB, … into HA for those that want to build out a more robust home auto / home lab server? HAOS does run Docker but gets upset if you install anything on it.
Yep. I love some Debian and docker compose. Although it isn't for everyone. I might circle back to that on some supervisorless setups after I catch the beginners up on things.
@@digiblurDIY Didn’t think it would be a priority but I have seen enough videos were people say “then can” or “they do” but don’t follow through and talk about how to do it. It may be low bandwidth content but not sure who is stepping people through the next step and how to integrate all the different pieces manually.
I've done a full step setup of MQTT, HA, NodeRed, etc on the docker setup with Unraid before, I haven't done it via docker compose yet in a video.
so im curious if the beelink n95 is a better option than installing on the Synology DS223 2-Bay 16TB NAS, as i intend on getting one of those so the family can offload from google/apple photo storage....and of course as a good old media drive.
Can you run a VM on it?
Wish this beelink unit had holes on the side to screw in some rack ears.
Some big ears! I have a 2U shelf for stuff like this.
I'm starting to hit some bottlenecks on my PI4. My plan for now will be to continue running basic HA and most add ons on it. I'm going to run more CPU intensive parts of HA elsewhere however. My thought is basic home automation tasks will continue to run normally when I'm playing with advanced stuff on another server. Perhaps at some point I'll move everything over to something more "beefy" but I don't see a point of breaking a very stable and snappy system.
What CPU intensive parts are you doing?
@leblancexplores frigate and Esphome compiles are two big ones for me.
I'm wondering, are there any potential compatibility issues if one goes the old refurbished route such as seen at 2:55?
You would have to go reallllly old where 64bit wasn't a thing.
Disappointed that you did not mention running HA on the lava lamp shown in the thumbnail 😂
It overheated and stopped working.
I hope that someone will create a simple installer for hone assistant os that can run from a usb drive. I know it can be done via Ubuntu and stuff but a more streamlined option would be nice.
Yes! That would be awesome. Something like the Opnsense, TrueNAS, etc installer would be amazing. Cuts the job down by 50% or more.
@@digiblurDIY I don't see an advantage because you would still have to write an image file to the USB drive the same way you would have to write an image file to an SD card. RPI imager is a single piece of software and you just pop the SD card in then select HAOS to write.
Am I missing something?
@@jmr When I did my install, you had to take the hd out of the mini pc and clone it to the usb.
@@djashjones Oooh, duh. I was just thinking about the RPI install. Yeah that's a pain in the butt!
@@djashjonesyou can very much install without removing the hard/ssd drives. Just boot with Ubuntu bootable USB drive and restore the downloaded HA image. That’s what I have done and doing on hardware installs of HA.
thanks. can we install it on HP or Dell wise terminal ?
Yes. I have seen people use these as well.
A bit new to this, so my question might sound stupid- but why do you need to remove the NVMe from the NUC and install it on a USB enclosure? Why not just directly on the NUC's NVMe?
Because they don't have a direct installer via USB like some other projects. There's a live Linux USB deal you can do but it is a major PITA
can you do one for HomeSeer now?
Right have X10 and SmartThings okay?
Da BEST😂
The BEST part ;)
Is it a must to have ZeegBee devices, or I can use my existing Tuya Wi-Fi devices?
Those are most likely cloud unless you flashed them.
Tuya aka smartlife killed the support for HA. So a big no for those devices. There are few devices that can be flashed with Esphome or LibreTiny but there is steep learning curve out there
I am a new home assistance (HA) user. Which HA hub I should use? Thanks
I would suggest a N95 NUC or something cheap like a refurb or i3 6th Gen or better
@@digiblurDIY Thanks
Can use some help for a newbie. Running windows 10. After starting etcher and opening down loaded file nothing happens.
could you jump into discord and share some screenshots? discord.digiblur.com
The HA Yellow has Zigbee. How hard and $ is it to put Zigbee on the Beelink ?
You are probably looking at around $30 for a decent USB stick which in my opinion will be better than the radio in the Yellow given it works damn solid with both ZHA and Zigbee2MQTT.
@@digiblurDIY What Zigbee USB stick you running? Conbee or something else?
@kevinhilton8683 CC2652P2 based chipset stick as I use Zigbee2mqtt myself for production.
Hi guess. Dumb question. I just ordered a Beelink S12. I see it will come as a windows 11 preinstalled on it. Should I keep windows and run HA over it (I am guessing VM)? Or format the SSD (remove the windows) and put fresh HAOS on it ? Recommendations?
Not a bad idea to backup the SSD in case you want to repurpose it later. I wouldn't run HAOS on Windows though unless you are just wanting to test it temporarily.
@@digiblurDIY So I already tested on my PC and then I set it up on Rasp pi 5 which was crazy expensive with heat sink + fan kit. I am returning that. I am already in deep with HA but with a lacking hardware lol.
I will backup SSD and format it, install HAOS on it directly. Thanks !!
@@digiblurDIY I am also exploring PROXMOX. Don't have a clue what that is yet, will check and see if it is good for me and choose that
@tahaiftekhar6466 yeah. Not worth it with the Pi anymore with how competitively priced the NUCs are.
@@digiblurDIY Thank you sir, you are awesome :)
When trying to flash image with balena etcher I get a "Something went wrong. If it a compressed image, please check that the archive is not corrupt. The writer process ended unexpectedly."
Use this version of etcher, we found that the latest version has problems:
sourceforge.net/projects/etcher.mirror/files/v1.18.11/balenaEtcher-Portable-1.18.11.exe/download
Hey can I get some assistance here pls. I see there are two beelink links, amazon and aliexpress. The amazon looks cooler and doesn't appear to be the device used in the tutorial..... Is either device OK to use does anyone know?
What does it come up as? I am seeing it match what I have. Comes up as the S12 N95 model.
@@digiblurDIY comes up as the NiPoGi Mini PC,12GB DDR4/256GB M.2 SSD,Ιntel Celeron N5105 Mini Computer(up to 2.9 GHz), Mini Desktop PC Support 4K Triple Display,Extended SSD,WiFi5,BT4.2, Small PC Home/Business/Office
Weird. Must be Amazon switching the listing in your area. Is the Beelink S12 available?
Can I boot HomeAssistant directly from a USB drive without an internal drive?
I think that's people are doing on the Pi with other drives.
Man I’m stuck at waiting for Home Assistant CLI to be ready 😕
I think you jumped into Discord and got the networking issue taken care of?
I unpowered and repowered it about 6 times till it went through.
I'm stunned that the HA developers haven't spent more time on ease of use. There are a lot of people (like me) who think it's kind of fun to open up a computer and fiddle around and type in commands, etc. I'll bet 98% of the potential user base isn't interested and/or doesn't have the skills. Why not create an HA installer that you could download onto a NUC or used Dell running Windows that you used to use for home computing, install via a few clicks, then reboot into HA?
Totally agree.. I'd love to see a USB installer like many other projects have. Those are so damn simple.
get the kid to put shoulders slightly in front of hips and drop right leg back.....
Thanks and will keep in mind! His first round ever on both of them. Mainly going over the mechanics of things, safety & handling right now.
Pi devices are too slow. Those beelink or any x86 are great.
Exactly! They have their place of course for small projects but for full blown home automation. Nahhh... this is 2024.
Not sure if anyone else is having this issue but when using balena etcher, my writer process fails when attempting to install Home Assistant
I haven't heard anyone reporting this.
@@digiblurDIY Using the version of balenaEtcher in your pinned comment solved the issue.
9:39
Waste of potential installing HaOS on a N95 chip.
You should run proxmox instead, HAOS doesn't use much procession power. Heck, docker is good enough for home assistant.
Probably a little bit more for someone just starting out to tackle unless there is a ready to go image of Proxmox and HA setup. Once they get some smart home stuff under their belt and they want to do more, then at that point they can use the same machine to load Linux, Proxmox, etc.
HaOS is essentially Docker. You can find add ons that will challenge the hardware although I take your point. Full Docker or proxmox are more configurable.
@@digiblurDIY
I disagree. Once you setup everything, even me, much less a layman will not start everything fresh again.
Weird because proxmox has the same image guide in this video.
Idk if you're out of the loop but proxmox has gone a long way in ease of use. Just point the image and it will do everything for you.
@@jmr
I've tried using HaOS as the main OS. It is too limiting as the dependency/driver support is not up to date for other stuff.
You need to manually find it yourself in command line which is a headache in of itself.
@@jackipiegg What about using dongles like for ZigBee? I'm always seeing people fighting to get USB passthrough. Was that an issue for you in Proxmox or did you have to do something "extra"?
it doesnt work.. both downloaded or url link. why?
What's the error?
I am having the same issues
Why does Home Assistant need a raspberry pi when the tablet has hardware?
It needs to run somewhere in the closet or cabinet. I wouldn't run it on a tablet unless maybe you were just trying to out in a VM or something.
@digiblurDIY ok thanks. I saw some people control their HA with a wall mounted tablet but wasnt sure why the tablet couldnt be the brains as well as the interface
I have seen some solutions like that but I would pass on that myself. When I get tired of the tablet since I didn't use it and just automated stuff what now?
first
Pi's are for Vegans and none of the cool kids hang out with the Vegans 🤣🤣
cheap used intel NUC from eBay
Yup. eBay is great to pick up some older but far useful PC equipment in the HA world for sure.