Dipping my toes into #HomeAutomation starting with a couple of #Sonoff temp/humidity sensors + Dongle Lite to use with my laptop and #HomeAssistant before having a dedicated hub.
That's £51 so ok to play and get the basics.
Got any thoughts or suggestions?
Home Assistant Green looks good for a dedicated hub but at £150 a bit much until I've tested the basics out. This is for a house I'm not living in yet so monitoring is all I need.
If the above goes well and I add a dedicated hub I'll probably use an old mobile with cheap broadband plan as a hotspot to allow remote access as I don't have broadband.
Does #HomeAssistant help handle IP address changes by the mobile ISP?
I have in the past hacked my own and could do that again, but wonder if this supported as it must be a common requirement for this kind of setup.
Or wait, do folk use a mobile app over the internet when not at home (with privacy)?
#HomeAutomation
@happyborg There are several options for external access:
- Home Assistant Cloud, from Nabu Casa (easiest, €5/month; you'll also get IIRC 5GB for a machine backup);
- If you have your own domain, you can use something like Cloudflare Tunnels (free, though you need to pay for the domain; medium difficulty);
- If you don't have a domain or don't want to fiddle with it, Tailscale or similar allow you to create a VPN network only accessible to machines on your account (free, easy to medium difficulty).
@mvrenselaar that's interesting thanks. Hadn't heard of either of those.
So your suggesting an #NUC and use #Proxmox to support HA and other handy apps in different VMs? Do you have a setup like this?
Of course you can do that. Actually, that is the main point of using #Proxmox
I have a Proxmox here that runs HA, Checkmk on Debian, RHEL and Windows VMs.
Aside: as long as HA means "Home Assistant" and not "High Availabilty". For the latter you need more Proxmox hosts. If one fails, the other one will run the VMs.
@robertdahlem Yes I meant Home Assistant. Thanks 🙂
@happyborg yes. HA in one, pihole in another and whatever i want as well.
A whole new rabbit hole :)
@happyborg Your first HA machine can be just about anything.
I usually suggest one of those 1L mini PCs that come from enterprises (check out Project TinyMiniMicro). You can get those second hand for under €100 rather easily, they'll be able to be expanded way more than any RPi or other SBC, and since they're technically enterprise gear they're built like tanks.
Hope this helps!
happyborg
Manu 
__Miguel_
Tim M
mini PC.
These things are so cheap anyway. I'll keep Tier1 in mind if I start to fill that room. 🙂
Matthijs
Robert Dahlem
Olivier Forget