Hey all, I’m starting to feel the need to expand my system. I currently have Home Asisstant running very smoothly on HAOS on a NUC7 i3 but I want to add more services and am looking for advice on how to do it.
What I want to run:
- Home Assistant - this is now mission critical for my house so I want it to run alone as HAOS as it it were an appliance
- I want to move to the HA voice assistant with local wake word detection as per year of voice part 4, processed on either HA machine or the 2nd one
- NVR - I want to ditch Ring & Blink for 2-3 IP cams, with storage and image recognition that can feed into HA for alerts etc
- Python scripts - I dabble in some non-intensive non-smart home stuff that involves running python scripts at a certain frequency. I currently use a Linode instance but would like to switch this over to local
- Plex server - this is less for video streaming and more for running kids’ bedtime stories and white noise all night streaming to Google homes. So I need it on a separate machine to HA so it continues when I restart HA
- File / photo backup NAS - I’d like to degoogle a bit so ideally with online option like Nextcloud. And backup to a cloud backup too
Hardware wise I have the NUC 7 i3 running HAOS (perfectly) and a RPi4 that I use for seasonal projects like Christmas lights but am open to using. Also I’m up for acquiring something new if needed (especially as I’ll be reducing my monthly costs on Ring, Google & Linode).
My ideas (What do you think? What am I missing? What would you do?):
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Leave HAOS on the NUC. Install openmediavault on Pi4 for NAS with containers for python script, nextcloud and NVR. Image recognition for videos could run with Coral on either the NUC as an addon or as a container on the pi.
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Move HAOS onto a HA Yellow. Install openmediavault on NUC for NAS with containers for python script, nextcloud and NVR. Image recognition for videos could run with Coral on either the HA yellow as an add on or a container on the NUC.
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Leave HAOS on the NUC. Buy a Synology NAS to do everything else
HA really don’t need much hardware to run. I’d recommend installing/moving the HA drive to a ~$200 laptop (built-in battery backup) and then using your existing NUC for everything else. Personally I just use fresh Ubuntu installs for my setup, but ProxMox or OpenMediaVault would make the containers easy.