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I'm planning to build several WiFi connected devices for home automation: an AC remote control and air quality sensors. These devices would send data and be controlled through a local server. I'm considering two approaches: running custom software on a server PC (hardware to be determined) or integrating with Home Assistant's protocols and purchasing their hardware. Would using Home Assistant be excessive for this use case?

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[–] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 23 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

HA isn't the only option. I think there's two other open source smarthome solutions out there(?) And you could probably do with just an MQTT broker and a Python script, or something like that...

But HA isn't a bad choice. They're doing a phenomenal job. And related projects like ESPHome make it really easy to integrate microcontrollers. And if you want to do more smarthome stuff, it has a plethora of features, integrations, an app...

Extra hardware isn't absolutely necessary. I have one server at home which does NAS, and I use 4GB of it's RAM to run a virtual machine with Home Assistant. That's enough for it, including a bunch of Addons.