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?
In terms of software, yes. But HA can be run on nearly anything—there’s no need to buy their hardware to use it.
Just be careful with SD cards if you’re using SBCs. Home Assistant does a lot of writing and if your SD card can’t handle repeated writes you may suddenly lose everything. Keep backups to another device and have a replacement SD card ready if extended downtime is going to be a problem for you.
Booting from USB drives has worked well for me
You can connect an SSD to these boards and boot from that instead of an SD card. Definitely the way to go especially considering SSDs dont really cost more than SD cards.
Adding to this, I recommend a used mini PC. There’s lots of cheap used office hardware out there on eBay that is more powerful, more serviceable, and more flexible than the hardware they sell or a raspberry pi.
While there are some problems with used minipcs (notably drivers), i don’t think they are relevant if it is only going to be used as a Home Assistant
That’s a good point. This can help me with things like adding a DNS server (I’m assuming pi-hole can be run standalone on a mini PC)
If you’re going to run Home Assistant OS you’d be able to run anything that can run in docker. Some things are available to install directly inside the Home Assistant apps system, otherwise you can install portainer and run any docker capable software.