Home Assistant 2022 - Which Hardware to Buy + Full Install Guide

say you want to dive into the smart home world and you're probably going to use home assistant and you don't know what hardware to use to run it on well we're going to build this massive home automation server nope that is mine don't throw it please is it raspberry nope someone else seriousness you can do home assistant on like a big server like this i mean i did a several video series on how to build your own unraid box that has multiple hard drives and docker containers and the whole thing but that's more of someone that's wanting to store a lot of media and then potentially like piggyback say home assistant node-red etc on that same box because it's a little more powerful but not everybody wants to get into that and i fully understand that so if you want to see some of that that's going to be back on that unraid series i did and i'll link that down below now what other options do we have so are we done with the 30 seconds yet yep okay now i'm not known to toe the corporate line a lot i mean i've been known to even tell big companies that their products suck right out the door so i'm going to shoot it to you straight because hey you're looking for the best and i'll be straight up there's no best the best and i if you've been around my discord a lot we pick on the word the best all the time because the best is purely subjective so the best maybe this for you the best maybe a big server is really going to be what fits your needs in your budget and well the thing is with the h a yellow i was blown away when i found out that it was still using the same exact processor as the raspberry pi 4 and then they're not shipping until i think it's said december 31st or january 1st let's just call it january 1st 23. yeah that's nuts that's a negative for me i i get the whole thing of you just being able to take it out the box and go and it has some stuff built into it but then the zigbee radio is that weird one i prefer the other one and yeah this is a whole rant if you're wanting to just skip this whole thing there's the markers down below you can jump on ahead if you want to see how we did with this box but the whole basis of this is it sucks i i'll be plain and simple with you the i played around just to see what and i did a fresh install of home assistant or raspberry pi 4 and speed is just i i'm i don't want to give that to anybody because that's where i kind of got this whole basis of this video was i was helping a friend family member etc of getting into the home assistant thing and i don't have the time to support them really of trying to build something and whatnot they're not that technical of hey you know doing linux and everything and the command line i fully get that and so i'm just gonna was gonna give them something you know put home assistant os on it but then there's no h.a blue there's no aha yellow and i did find that they had that the odroid out there but i think that's also back ordered now and so that's where i jumped over to ebay and found this little guy and guess what i paid less for this than what i we would have with say the h8 blue or the odroid one with a little different case the same board i believe but this is like four to five times faster and yeah it may use a few more watts of power but still this thing is stupid efficient now there's all kinds of different models out there i'll leave the link down to this one i got off ebay there was a bunch of different ones out there that were in this little ultra small form factor you'll see that usf that's ultra small form factor computers and the great thing about them is they're full intel processors meaning that you're just gonna get some crazy horsepower out of them plus you get expandability which i'll go through and we'll jump in and i'll show you some of the cool expandabilities on this little box that is not that much bigger i mean by the time you put it in a closet are you really going to throw a fit between the size of these things probably not and the power usage not that much difference but you're really going to enjoy the performance and you're going to kind of future proof yourself going with a box like this so we're going to jump in let's look at the hardware on this and then we'll we'll also show you how to put home assisted os on this there's no really command line stuff geekiness or whatever it's all going to be gui based i this is going to be really simple to jump through but i'll show step by step on how to get it done well i know i kind of bashed some of the ha yellow ha blue a little bit but hey i would like a good hardware choice at this time now if that does support the home assistant community and the development etc so i do understand where they're going with that but hey if you do i would prefer to have a better piece of hardware that makes my home faster more reliable and hey i'll just go ahead and donate something to the actual help the community out the development et cetera or you can even do that naboo constant thing that allows you to opt into the cloud that way you can control your stuff remotely without having to deal with vpn and everything else and it's pretty secure but of course you do have the other method you can do and that recurring cost does help the development of the homeless system that makes all of this run so with that said there's a bunch of different models this is the optiplex 3050 it's a dell computer and this is refurbished i got it off of ebay i think for about a hundred and forty dollars u.s and of course that was bidding on it or that was a buy it now actually they do have some cheaper ones i saw where you could do some bidding or whatnot there's a bunch of different models but this one which is cool it came with a solid state hard drive now here's the part that i really love about this computer it is an i3 7100 t and i believe the t is dealing with some power efficiencies in there and i'll post a graphic up or maybe a picture about showing like the typical wattage usage of this computer as well because i was very impressed with that now this pops out tool-less this is the little hard drive this one i can came with i think was 128 gig even came with windows but we're not using windows here so definitely don't worry about trying to boot up if you want to just use it to boot up to maybe update the bios on it hey go right ahead but i don't recommend especially on any computer out there you're buying off ebay that comes with windows don't use the windows that comes with it definitely load if you're gonna this is just a side rant if you're gonna load some other operating systems as windows load your own that's a fully official copy and not something that someone else loaded on the computer for you because you never know what they did now the cool part about this computer is this has a spot for hard drives so this is two and a half inch hard drive i could put a spinner style hard drive say two four terabyte whatever and the flexibility there is so i can put on recordings of say frigate or whatever type of nvr for recordings or media right on this box and right in this without having to impact anything with home assistant itself now if you look closer now the cool part about this is is a once they become available i know that's the mythical board right now is this could be a slot to throw in for your google coral for doing frigate and that's that to offload that type of deal for doing object and person detection etc straight it's an open source nvr with cameras and you could do that straight on this box well that little board could pop in right there now over here on this side where you have these two is this is for the m.2 ssd if you're not familiar with that it's a little pcie board such as this one i bought a little cheap one and i think this one is yeah this one's 256 gig and it just pops in and so you could install any really 256 gig overkill for what you're probably doing with home assistant and then you could pop in your hard drive for doing your different recordings that's your larger size storage you could throw in there has a couple usb on the front and that way you could do say doing something with zigbee or z-wave you could plug those in on the front there as well as you got you know party on the back so you've got four usb on the back you've got hdmi and displayport as well and yeah that brings me up to the next thing this is ethernet so fully wired you're not going to have any issues with wi-fi or whatever but if you really wanted to you could pop in a wi-fi board now the other cool thing is that i almost forgot to mention is the processor in here has an on-board gpu with the i3 7100 t it has that on-board gpu so you could use that for frigate to help offload even further for more power efficiency cpu efficiencies and you could offload all the motion detection stuff because that's not coral doesn't do that part as well as if you really want to get into doing the whole plex world or whatever with media transcoding you can offload that on this same box as well how cool is that a small little box and you can definitely see you can get a lot more things and flexibility and foolproof yourself versus what you could off of the current offerings for that blue and that yellow but i do understand that you're going to have to load yourself you know their own home assistant os and that leads us into well how do we do that so for the ssd users and i do highly recommend the nvme option if your particular board has that these just are stupid fast i'm using a little this is made by sabrin they're pretty decent company for different little ssds but the cool thing is you just take and pop this in to this little usb caddy as i would call it and then there's this little door and we're not going to have this in here for that long they may even have a little heatsink thing here but it's a tool-less design just close it you're done and the cool part is it has usbc and they have the cables and everything if you want to just do usb a or whatever and we'll just plug this straight into our computer i'm going to be using windows to load this they make a bunch of different boxes and things this is just one model that i found and i use this for in the it world since now i transfer stuff off of laptops and whatever thing it's a lot easier i just pull somebody's laptop and i take the little whether it be a hard drive or an ssd or whatever and you just really just take and pop this in boom because i guess this is meant to stand up you can even put bigger hard drives full three and a half inch hard drives and you can plug this in it comes with the usbc as well and then there's a little power adapter to it but they do give you all the cables and the whole nine yards and i will leave all the links to all this stuff that i just these are standard tools that i use because yeah people come to me and say hey travis can you fix my laptop and transfer my stuff off et cetera so this is some of the stuff that i have but it makes it easy for the home assistant world as well but hey i guess if you're going to do all that h.a blue yellow stuff you really won't need this and you really won't be tinkering much but hey what home assistant user doesn't do the whole tinkering thing at this point now definitely go follow along the docs because yeah these the videos are you know it's a single point in time and things do change so i'm going to kind of follow along but if things change definitely follow what's in the current documentation now i'm just going documentation installation this is the home assistant dot io i'll leave the link down below but if you probably just google it you'll come right up and i'm gonna be coming down here and picking the generic nook install even though this is not a nook now yes hey yes one of the flexibility options for this particular box is if you jump into and hey i want to do my own linux thing roll my own do my own containers or hey you want to put proxmox on it or whatever guess what you can do that and you can do it at a later time that's the awesome thing about this particular hardware gives you that future flexibility so we're going to jump in just do the haos right now and i'll go through some of the bios things and we'll show i'll show some of the things of where we had to change stuff in our particular computer it's going to be a little different based on everybody's different bios versions computers models etc now the first thing you'll need is the balian etcher if i'm saying the name right or wrong i'm sure i'm saying it wrong but i have that downloaded they have the link here just click it download i use the portable one and install it just download it and run it it's gonna look just like the one that they have and you'll notice if you scroll down on their deal they'll say you can do the get url you can actually if you highlight over this and there's instructions right there if you just hit the copy button and then go to the etcher and say flash from url you can see i've done it before but i'll go ahead and paste it in here see i had 7.5 they do have 7.6 now so definitely always go get the latest one that's on their documentation because this video is going to age and yeah some things do get better with age and that's not me but whatever select target now there's that little sabrin usb drive that's that little module i put in there yours mapper may have a little different name do verify you're not doing this to your operating system i don't think it will allow you to do that but it hides those and go ahead and check it and i'll hit select and then i'll hit flash it's going to give you another warning don't worry so yeah i want to do yes i'm sure and it's going to do you probably have to have a little prompt that's going to gray out your screen hit yes and it's going to actually download in the background unextract and it's going to go in flash so go ahead and just get up go do something else go take a walk around the neighborhood whatever it may be and come back to this guy and it should be done in the meantime hey go ahead and hit that link down below for that like whatever it may be or and definitely join us in discord because there's lots of cool people that can help you walk through a bunch of this different things or maybe pick different hardware whatever it may be a lot of cool people down in that digiblar diy discord so once you do have the flash complete we'll go ahead and close that and basically you'll just need to reassemble if you did all this finish it and then we'll need to start it up well we're doing this a little backwards we're going to show you some of the bio stuff i'll go ahead and reassemble it but i'll jump into the bios before i let it boot up now there is one thing that you do need to change and they do cover it in the documentation and i do it now i skipped that part since we are doing this kind of backwards but i was trying to save from having to fire it up and whatever and just do this all in one shot is there's this they talk about this disable secure boot and i'm not going to go into the whole details of everything what that is it basically just allows home assistant to boot up so what you want to do is make sure that you feed boot mode is enabled and secure boot is disabled and this is going to be different for every different manufacturer bios version etc so you probably need to if you can't find it go look at their documentation a lot of them have the pdfs you can download so without resizing this thing i know it may be small and mobile but if you look i've already done this on here but i'll show you the options i'll show you a couple things that i go through is i do make sure that my ufe this m.2 pcie you may have yours may be different because if you use an ssd secure boot device here's that you'll see i have it listed as disabled so that's going to allow home assistant to boot up there's you can go through some of the other options like say for instance multi-core support uh the virtualizations you know you definitely want to have all that stuff turned on one key i like to do is for power management is you see this where it says ac recovery and what that means is i set mine to power on so if ever i lose power or whatever turn it off or whatever you just plug it in thing comes right back on it's beautiful so if yours has this option go dig around look for it and make sure it is set to power on you can put last power state but that's totally up to you i prefer to use power on all the time there's another option if i can find it is keyboard errors i like to turn that off because i probably won't have a keyboard on my device now if you say if you have some other you want to leave a keyboard hooked to it in a screen that's all up to you i mean even really if you're doing this say on a laptop that's a beautiful thing because those laptops have batteries keyboards and screens built right in and let's go ahead and give it and see if it will boot up so we'll go ahead and exit i didn't make any changes but if you're just going to ask you to apply changes etc go ahead and do that and it's going to start booting up it's pretty stupid fast with this thing will boot up even for just a little core i3 now this is the initial setup of home assistance so that first time because it has to download a bunch of different things but you'll see it's a lot quicker and we can get straight into the onboarding of home assistant itself so we'll fast forward through this piece it's got a couple of things it does here i'm gonna make a liar out of me and it may come up rather quickly let's just try and hit it with a browser because it says it's ready to go we're pretty much done with the computer itself there's nothing we really need to do on the command line so we'll just go ahead and minimize this for the hdmi and we'll pop in and see if we can onboard to it so it's doing its little thing of downloading or whatever it say it may take up to 20 minutes it probably is not going to especially on this hardware but we won't make you wait we'll wait for this and we'll come right back didn't take but a couple minutes ready to do the onboarding pretty stupid fast and we'll run through a quick little thing here but pretty much home assistant is ready to go now if you wanted to at this point and you're wanting to migrate machines you could just restore from a backup of another home assistant that's using h-a-o-s with the supervisor we'll hit next we'll hit finish now home assistant's pretty much ready to go now one thing i would recommend to go do is go to your down here your profile and there is an advanced mode because you'll be missing a lot of stuff turn on your advanced mode and that will allow you to see all the things and i like to force my dark mode as well so we'll jump in let's go throw in a couple of add-ons you'll see how quick this system is and let's say we want to throw in esp home and we'll come in here and hit install and we'll jump back and let's see we'll do with something else um mqtt so we'll throw in our mosquito broker install that guy and pretty much you can jump through you can see it's really simple but that's pretty much it this thing is set up ready to go on a stupid fast hardware if there's other things you'd like to see home assistant the different installs and whatnot or different conversions i know they've done some stuff with zigbee to mqtt they've made it much easier with the supervisor way of configuring things and maybe we'll cover some of that in some future videos with doing this setup that we're doing for a friend slash family member so if you've got some other hardware solutions hardware boxes that you've used and whatever they maybe think are a little better than what we're doing here definitely shoot us a comment down below and let us know because i always like to see different little solutions that are cost effective and yet they do work great and have good reliability and speed because it just sucks having to wait for your smart home and that's dumb just make your smart home stupid fast and this is what that's gonna do look at which camera you looking at okay ready press hold on buttons and it's cool and stuff that one's good i like it okay just or tell them to take care that's a good one as well so y'all take care we try to get this one for you catch it [Music] hang on hang on [Music] [Music] so am i [Music] you

Channel: digiblurDIY

Views: 121,997

Keywords: digiblur, digiblurDIY, home automation, hass.io, hassos, tasmota, esp32, esp8266, arduino, esphome, diy, smart home, electronics, cameras, zigbee, wifi, home assistant getting started, how to install home assistant, how to smart home

Id: rch6jcMfwEs

Length: 25min 1sec (1501 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 29 2022