My Home Assistant Hardware Setup

Introduction

I have been wanting to write a short introduction to my Home Assistant setup for some time. If you are not familiar with Home Assistant, its the premier open source home automation software that allows you to control your smart home all with privacy first mindset. I have been using Home Assistant for about 5 years now and wanted to walk through my setup.

Choosing Hardware

When I started using Home Assistant setup in 2020, none of the official hardware releases (Blue, Green, Yellow) were announced or released. Common hardware choices were raspberry pi, thin client computers, Mini PC / Intel Nuc, or old computer/laptops. I would recommend something low power. Early versions of the raspberry pi (eg 1,2, and 3’s) are pretty slow and might not be powerful enough, but the later variants should be good, along with most thin clients and older computers.

When I started using home assistant, I started hosting it on a virtual machine and passed through a USB zigbee device to the virtual machine. I ran into issues when rebooting and the virtual machine wouldn’t always reconnect back to the USB zigbee device.

Note: I recommend using a standalone hardware when using any zigbee or zwave USB gateway devices.

After a couple of years, I decided it was time for a standalone hardware to host my instance of home assistant. I decided to buy a HP T620 off of ebay for $42 as it has decent processing power, ram, and an ssd, make sure you get one with a power supply. When I received it, I flashed home assistant and restored my setup from my virtual machine installation. I did have to replace the flash drive after a year or two, so you might want to do that right away since a 64gb drive is pretty cheap.

In addition to the T620, you might want Zigbee or Z-wave dongles to connect respective wireless devices. Here are some common ones:

ConBee II – Zigbee Dongle (I have this one)

Conbee III – Zigbee Dongle

Zooz Z-Wave

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Conclusion

This is a simple introduction post, but hopefully you get some idea on what your home assistant hardware setup could look like. Whether you’re just beginning your smart home journey or looking to upgrade your current system, choosing the right hardware can make a big difference in performance, reliability, and flexibility.

Note: I plan on expanding on my setup so keep an eye out for future Home Assistant and smart home post, I will walk through my ~20 Zigbee lights and other devices.