I run my entire smart home from a single mini PC with Home Assistant

I’ve been dreaming of a unified smart home since I first got a Philips Hue starter kit years ago. Then I set up the kit, and the reality of the siloed smart home sank in. My lights needed a hub to work, everything needed the cloud, and I could only connect the hub to a single voice assistant ecosystem at a time, severely limiting its usefulness. If you had told me all those years ago that I’d be running my smart home from a single dashboard running on a mini PC, I probably would have laughed in your face.

It was inconceivable back then that a home user could self-host a smart home hub, build it with the integrations, sensors, and protocols they wanted, and have it all designed to be local-first. Back then, the cloud was the hot thing, and companies wanted to reduce the complexity for the user by abstracting away all the control. But that came with a compromise on data security and privacy.

The other thing it enabled was a fractured smart home environment. There wasn’t (and still isn’t) a single company that carries a full range of smart home technology, so there’s a massive market for companies that make their own dashboard and do the hard work for you. But with Home Assistant I’ve made my own dashboard with a little hard work and perseverance, now running my smart home from a single mini PC. And the thing is, it’s not a huge stretch for anyone else to do the same.

Home Assistant is the smart home platform I wanted all along

It might be a little rough around the edges, but it’s mine

The unified smart home has long been a feature in sci-fi and popular culture, whether it’s the computer in Star Trek, along with replicators to make a post-scarcity culture, to The Jetsons and the ever-dependable housekeeper, Rosie. I grew up hoping my home would be like that one day, and as the necessary technologies trickled onto the market, I became more and more excited.

But that excitement soon turned to disillusionment, as every smart home ecosystem seemed designed to be apart from the others, with only basic functions being able to pass the barriers. Protocols like Matter were supposed to fix that, but it’s been years since the launch, and the dream of the manufacturer-supplied unified smart home is still out of reach.

Home Assistant is the closest approximation of the future I was promised, and it makes my smart home better, whether I’m in it or not. At first, I wasn’t sure if it would be my solution, so I had Home Assistant self-hosted in a Docker container to try it out. I soon ran into the limitations of doing it that way, mainly that the add-on store wasn’t available, and moved my setup to a virtual machine inside a Proxmox host on a mini PC. And it’s been nothing short of fantastic so far.

Templates for success

Okay, templates are called blueprints in Home Assistant, but the point is that the community is vast and talented, and the chances are that if I buy a new smart device, there’s already a host of handy tools to use. You can add advanced functionality like actionable notifications, so you get one-tap actions on the toast notification without opening the app. You can also set up calendar-based notifications and alerts, or thousands (probably) of other blueprints created by the community, and that’s one of the first places I search when I add a new device.

It enabled me to drop the apps of so many devices

It seemed that every time I added a new smart home device to my house, I needed another app to control them. Apps for light bulbs, apps for vacuum cleaners, apps for appliances, and more. They all cluttered up my smartphone’s home screen, and it was miserable to use. For the most part, I sidestepped the issue by linking everything I could to Alexa or Home Assistant, but the integrations were never quite as powerful as the app, and I could never uninstall them.

With a few notable exceptions, every smart home device I own is now connected to Home Assistant, and I rarely need the individual apps. What’s more, I can set up automations between those devices in ways I could never have dreamed of before. Sure, I don’t use that many automations yet, but being able to create and control them from a single tab in Home Assistant makes ongoing management simple.

Home Assistant doesn’t need a powerful computer to run

And I’ve got plenty of other virtual machines running on the same box

For how powerful the operating system is, Home Assistant doesn’t need much processing power to run. It’s perfectly happy on a Raspberry Pi or other SBC, but I wanted a little bit more power and reliability, which led me to use the Beelink ME mini as the host device for Home Assistant. This has an Intel N150 CPU, two 2.5GbE NICs, a handful of USB ports for adding a Zigbee or Z-Wave controller, and a low power consumption of 6W. That’s less than most of my light bulbs, so I can keep it running 24/7 without worrying about my power bill.

It also runs Proxmox as the hypervisor because it’s lightweight and is something that I’m familiar with using. At some point, I plan on getting two more and setting up a High Availability Proxmox cluster, so that my smart home control will survive hardware failure.

Tons of room for activities

The six M.2 slots for NVMe storage on this mini PC is overkill for Home Assistant, which doesn’t use much storage. But because I’m using Proxmox, I also run other services and operating systems on this box. Most of the installed SSDs are passed through to TrueNAS for speedy storage, but I’ve also got a few Linux distros and other assorted things on there. I have to be careful not to overload the CPU and the 12GB of RAM, but other than that, it’s powerful enough for Home Assistant and some of my home lab experiments.

A mini PC running Home Assistant is the home hub my smart home deserves

I haven’t finished building my smart home to my satisfaction, so while the mini PC running Home Assistant will stay, it will get some additions. My Zigbee devices are connected to an Eero mesh network, but I’m planning on replacing those, so I’ll need a Zigbee coordinator. I might change to Z-Wave because I’m not fully entrenched in any one ecosystem yet, but I need to see which devices I’ll need and what will meet the needs of my household.

But instead of picking any old devices and dealing with another app on my phone, I now look for Home Assistant support, and more importantly, access to the API. With API access, I can build an entirely local smart home with only one app to keep installed, Home Assistant. And with it running on a mini PC, I know it has enough processing power to handle any number of devices I might add.