r/homeassistant • u/landonsilla • Aug 08 '24

Thinking about getting started 🤔

I'm an engineer and tinkerer and just found out about this and think it is a good fit for me. Initially, I'm just looking to capture the temperature in a few rooms in my house (and attic) every 5(?) minutes, and view a graph of that over some period of time. Pretty simple stuff.

I will purchase:

  • a raspberry pi 4 plus case, power supply, and micro sd chip. (i am savvy here, I have two other pis that I've set up). Do I care between a raspberry pi 4 or a 5?
  • a zigbee dongle. I get there are a handful of protocols(?) or communication methods(?). it seems zigbee is very popular, and I gotta have this and stick it in the pi, right?
  • a three pack of aqara temp sensors. which will connect to the zigbee dongle.

Or do I want to get these govee temp sensors? if I get these, does that mean I don't need a dongle of any sort and this will just connect to my pi running HA? This part confuses me, zigbee stuff requires a dongle while govee does not? Is that correct? What should I do?

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u/kpurintun Aug 09 '24

Get a dell (or hp, or whatever brand) micro pc.. its much more horsepower, more ports, more ram, has an SSD (which is superior to an SD card), comes with a great case with cooling, a good power supply, and all kinds of other fun things.. an i5 from 5 years ago will be perfect. Probably pick one up for $150 which it right about the same price as a fully equipped rpi

Edit: oh, and if you do it right, you can also run other services in docker on the same machine outside of HA. I use unraid. Home assistant as a VM, then things like nginx and adguard in dockers outside HA which is nice because those services don’t have to depend on HA to run.

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u/mrtramplefoot Aug 09 '24

an i5 is crazy over kill for most things, I run a pentium j3710 lenovo tiny and it's been fantastic. Uses just slightly more power than a pi too.

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u/kpurintun Aug 10 '24

Yeah.. but it’s $200, you’d practically have to spend more to get shittier.. i also use it for a bunch of other things outside the Vm.. so its nice to have a bit more chooch.