homeassistant

The house has to work damn near 100% of the time, so I run it on a dedicated Raspberry Pi 4 that has Home Assistant OS with the full stack on it. Works great!

I have that Beelink and while I don't run Home Assistant on it (I run that from a VM on my NAS) , it does run a whole bunch of stuff, including Plex, and it's more than capable.

I think you have a couple of options here:

1. Run HAOS on the bare metal and use Home Assistant addons to add the other functionality you want. Addons are HA managed Docker containers and there's lots of them out there, including Plex. What I don't know is whether you can access hardware acceleration this way, which you can do via regular Docker (see below).

2. Install something like Unraid, Proxmox or whatever flavour of Linux you prefer - literally anything that supports full blown VMs and Docker at the same time. Install HAOS in a VM and use Docker for everything else. Passthrough /dev/dri to any Docker containers that use hardware acceleration (Plex) and you're golden.

It's a great little box. Enjoy!

RasPi 4B with the dedicated HassOS distro.

Installation was easy. Upgrades run regularly and very stable.

Home assistant in a podman container uses only about 400mb memory and .05% of cpu on my home server.

Put Linux on your mini PC and you can run dozens of services on it without it breaking a sweat.

I'm running it on a pi5. It was able to handle everything including voice easily although the voice thing out of the box is quite limited. I was able to do a lot with it through automations with custom commands though. It was pretty much able to replace my Google assistant system.

I've now upgraded it with ollama and Whisper on a network device (old laptop with i7 CPU and GTX1050 mobile GPU) and that works perfectly with llama3.2:3b. Pretty accurate and works well enough. Especially useful coupled with the local home assistant command processing since that by passes the LLM.

On a Pi4.

I was running it on a VM on the home server but then any downtimes that machine had were also HA downtimes. Decided that mattered enough to run it on it's own hardware.

I personally run it on a MiniPC that runs proxmox. You could run other stuff on it through proxmox as well. I would definitely recommend running always on server stuff on something other than your main daily PC.

You could probably run all the other stuff on there as well, although transcoding might slow things down a bit. HA itself should be fine as once you've set up all your automations it's not like you need to interact with it directly and you'll just get a little bit of lag at worst.

Proxmox HA cluster with a SAN. VM migrations go wheeeeeeeeee.

I'd just run HA on the mini PC. There are a boatload of add-ons that you can install which will allow you to make better use of the hardware.

One of a few other docker containers on VM via Proxmox on a cheap Chinese mini PC.

Pretty much any cheap minipc will do. A very power efficient N100 is more than enough, and probably cheaper than a Pi board now.

HAOS on a virtual machine inside on unraid on home server made from old pc parts.

3b+ here. I'd like to upgrade to a 4 or 5 but haven't had any pressing reason to do it.

HA Supervised running under Debian 12 on a mini laptop with an N200 processor takes about 3% CPU. With the Frigate NVR add-on running 2 security cameras it uses about 10%.

I have an Intel NUC (3rd gen I think - it's several years old by now) which runs Proxmox, which runs several VMs including Home Assistant on HAOS. The only thing I did was upgrade the RAM as the VMs eat this quickly...

Other services I run on this small box are AdGuard, Paperless-ngx, KitchenOwl, tt-rss and two Nightscout instances.

I have a "server" cobbled together out of old PC parts. I have proxmox running on it and Home Assistant is one of the VMs running on that machine.

I have HA running as a native service on my home server, which is composed of literal garbage parts from other PCs, and runs many other native services in tandem, including Plex and some VPN gunk. HA has very low system demand, and it only makes sense to use a dedicated system for it if it's very low-powered and you have no other server in the home.

What you should do is set all of your services up on your new mini PC and use that to host all of your services, allowing you to power down your likely more power-hungry PC.

I've got a Lenovo m910q in my basement with home assistant running on docker. (Also on that machine is an overly large set of docker images doing other stuff. I wish I knew enough about docker compose when I set up home assistant, because that's the only server that will cause a bit of pain if it fails and I need to resurrect it. (I'll do it right next time... )

Partial list of services that PC has: home assistant, adguard, swag (reverse proxy), *arr stack(downloading files), calibre(book housing), jellyfin(movie and TV streaming), mealie(recipe management), habatica(habit fixing tool), homepage (to manage all the links and ports), and a 3 user Minecraft server. I only notice things going wrong when watching a movie AND playing Minecraft.

I tried setting up orcaslicer, but so far I hate it. (Hosted, it's not a pleasant experience)

I run it on a Raspberry Pi 4 (I happened to have a spare one, also BUY EUROPEAN and all that). There's a dedicated image for it.

Seems a good deal and certainly power efficient.

Before on a rPi 4...now in a VM on a refurb mini PC and changed memory to 32GB and 2 TB of storage. My PC might be twice as fast as the Beelink on paper but draws 10 x more power. I guess the config of the VM really matters most.

I had it on a old pc, running in a virtual machine alongside other stuff, but switched to running it as HAOS on its own mini pc. Just felt simpler.

I'm currently running mine on a spare Raspberry Pi 4, but the fan on it is kind of loud, so I'm considering getting myself one of those home assistant green machines.

Raspberry Pi 400. I thought having the built-in keyboard would be useful and as it turns out, it wasn't! My first thing running on a Pi so I didn't realize how much it depends on things running remotely. Oh well!

You can run a lot of stuff inside HA by adding this:

Got no home assistant for now but plan to do it. I am running jellyfin, nextcloud, traccar and immich on Beelink s12 pro. But technically you can run all that on any other brand which sells n100 minis. This machin is like 12w under load! Magical! Also can do 4k video easy. Besides all my services, I use it as HTPC under my TV.

I have mine on a rPi 3b+, in a docker container. Works great

Ah, great choice! I use the same model for my NAS. Anyway the N100 is really powerful for this task, and should have enough spare power to allow experimentation with different addons. Plex likes the intel chip and uses it for transcoding, if you want to do that.