alt Hacker NewsHome Assistant is awesome and I highly recommend checking it out. Even if you have an existing smart house hub/platform you can often integrate HA in cleanly.
I used SmartThings for years and was hesitant to switch but I was able to control all my devices in ST from HA without moving/repairing/etc devices over. Once I had seen the power of HA I started a _slow_ migration over (took over a year cause I was lazy). The entire time the house worked just fine (except when the internet was down and then only the HA “native” stuff worked).
My biggest recommendations and I wish I could make this text bigger:
Do NOT use a raspberry pi for your HA host. They are unreliable and you will incorrectly blame HA for RPi’s failings (like I did). After moving to a dedicated cheap BeeLink mini PC my HA became rock solid.
You can play around with HA in docker or a VM as well and even host it there indefinitely but avoid RPi’s as your host, you’ll thank me later. If you want dedicated hardware (I do recommend that since smart house stuff often needs to be “always up” and the family doesn’t care/understand why your homelab is down, just that the lights don’t work) then go for a BeeLink or HA’s hardware offerings.
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Raspberry Pis themselves are perfectly reliable given a stable power supply and good storage — steer clear of slow and flakey SD cards.
The HAOS virtual appliance is awesome though.
Can you elaborate on why the raspberry pis are unreliable? Is it the SD cards, or something else?
I got into ST about a year or so before samsung acquired them. Amazing ecosystem at the time and the ST community was great. I even taught my self groovy, so I could write my own device handlers. Then it went down hill couple of years after the acquisition. I still have my gen 2 ST hub and have been slowly trying to pivot towards HA. How easy is it to integrate ST into HA? I have a bunch older zwave wall switches and few other sensors that are tied into ST. But I really hate the ST app.
Raspberry Pi is a bad choice for any application that frequently writes data to disk. Most Home Assistant setups will often have historical tracking of at least one data point, which means that it would be constantly writing to disk.
If you get a high quality SD card with more storage than you'll ever need (64GB, 128GB), you can have a stable system for a while until the SD card becomes corrupt. The larger SD cards help with longevity because it means the SD card can spread writes out over a larger area, which means it'll take longer for the SD card to go bad.
Make sure to always have RAM logging enabled on your Pi! DietPi defaults to RAM logging.