Smart-Home Project: 09/12/22

Monday, September 12, 2022

Hardware: Home Assistant host

Let's start - it's time to prepare the system.

Since I will be using smart systems from different suppliers at home, I need an aggregator that will enable communication between different environments. Currently, there are several such systems on the market: Open Hab, Home Assistant, Domoticz (these are just examples).

I chose the Home Assistant for my Smart Home system - mainly because I already know and used it. In addition, I like the philosophy of Home Assistant and the way and amount of integration with various smart systems. It can work on various hosts - starting from MS Windows, through Docker and ending with VM and Raspberry. For me, it will run on Qnap NAS as a virtual machine.

The basis to run Home Assistant is the equipment on which it will run.

HARDWARE: SERVER

Requirements: good CPU (at least 4 CPUs), a lot of RAM. Necessarily USB ports (but they don't have to be 3.0+). It's good if it has several network cards - thanks to this, you can separate the smart-home traffic from the rest.

The server on which the Home Assistant will work is the heavily tuned QNAP TVS-872XT.

Technical data:

CPU: i5 8400T
RAM: 64 GB
GPU: Quadro K2200
Network:

2x1GbE connected as 2GbE in alb (active load balancing) - I use this card for VPN support
1x5GbE (this is 10GbE connected to the 5Gb port on the switch) - used to transfer data to / from virtual machines
1x10GbE - the main data network.

In this equipment, I replaced the RAM with 2x32GB (I found it on Amazon for ~ 900PLN). When I bought 8 discs, they cost me PLN 230 each. SSD drives (I have a Samsung EVO 980) cost about PLN 200 per piece also on Amazon. I bought the Nvidia card from Allegro for ~ 450 PLN.

Software:

OS: QTS Hero v5 with ZFS support
Native support for Virtualization Station

Disks:

8x2TB Seagate Iron Wolf configured in RAID6 - these are disks for storage. Here I keep movies, photos, other household stuff. Virtual machines land here as well.
2xNVME SSD 500GB - this is a RAID0 array, QTS Hero system and applications are installed on it
2xSATA SSD 500GB - these are drives for buffering data from the main matrix. Qnap has a pretty cool mechanism for storing your most-used data on fast SSDs.

Pros : quite powerful machine, allows you to run multiple virtual machines. It has two PCIe slots for additional expansion - in my case they are occupied by the NVIDIA K2200 card (used for AI support) and a 10GB + 2xSSD card. Additionally, you can throw 8 SATA disks and 2 NVME disks.

Cons : price. Basic set with i5 + 16GB of frame, without disks, costs about 10,000 PLN. Added to this is the cost of disks, network cards (but not necessary) of memory expansion. The equipment is quite large and heavy and will not fit everywhere. I currently have it (but it barely fits) in a 19 "rack.

Alternatives :

Cheaper NAS models enabling virtual machines to work. It is important that they have at least 8GB of RAM and a decent processor. For the Home Assistant I allocate 6GB RAM and 6 processor cores. I used to have a QNAP (TS-435) with a Celeron and 8GB of RAM on it and it was fairly decent, but I noticed that the system is quite slow. With this configuration, we will not run anything else on the hardware.
RaspberryPI - The only reasonable option here is the RPi4 with 8 GB of RAM. This can be a good starter hardware, but requires you to buy an external drive (using an SD card is not a good idea for a Home Assistant);
The rest - for example, a VM for Windows is not a good idea because it requires a laptop / PC to be turned on all the time

I will post a description of the NAS configuration by the way - here I have a 10GbE network and a split AP (Asus ZenWifi 6E) and a Mikrotik router,

LINKS AND EXTERNAL RESOURCES

NAS: QNAP TVS-872XT
Memory upgrade: Crucial 32GB
HDDs: Seagate IronWolf 2TB
SSD drives: Samsung 980 500GB
QNAP expansion card: QM2-2S10G1T
GPU card: NVIDIA K2200

Alternative Resources

Raspberry Pi4: RPi ModelB
QNAP: TS-453D

I do not throw in links to the promotion (although I recommend it - you can save a lot) because it is constantly changing.

A bit about the project.

On this blog you will find a description of my struggles with the smart-home system. It will be completely subjective, based on my personal experiences and conclusions.

I have been working with smart home for several years and I decided to help people like me who are at the beginning of their adventure with such systems.

More and more manufacturers are placing "agitated" devices on the market. Not all of them are polished, not all are suitable for real use. And here you will find information on what and how to use.

The current state is already a working Home Assistant, but it is preparing to move to a new home, where I will do everything from scratch, using the experience from previous years.

After several years of working with Home Assistant (and smart-systems), I know _ a little_ which are suitable for use, what errors to avoid and what is a good solution.

Below are a few graphics so that you know what solutions I use (but these are not all - I try to constantly expand the system).

Home Assistant as an aggregator and control center. Also as a point of contact with Google Assistant and Alexa.

Lights, bulbs and switches

Communication protocol for devices - used by eg Fibaro

Communication protocol for devices. Used e.g. by Philips Hue but also by Aquara and IKEA.

Voice assistant. Unfortunately, he doesn't speak Polish at all.

Asus is the manufacturer of the Wifi routers I use. It integrates well with the Home Assistant but also provides a very stable Wifi network - both in the 2.4MHz, 5MHz band and in the new 6MHz standard