At what point do you just go for Home Assistant green? It's still cheaper, yes it has less ram but also consumes less power.
homeassistant
Home Assistant is open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server. Available for free at home-assistant.io
If all you want is HA, it's perfectly fine to run on a RPi.
But personally I've grown to host about a dozen other services so the additional compute power, storage and memory is important.
I actually have a server for my other needs and HA Green. Mostly since I want to run the mission critical stuff for my home on a different machine, this way if something were to go wrong with my home server it'd still keep working.
I should add that bigger esphome projects (with custom components) take up to 5 minutes to compile. But that honestly isn't too bad.
I totally understand mission critical motivations, but I reached a different conclusion from you. I’ve been HA’ing for a long time and everything dies eventually.
Do you have a backup HA green in the cupboard? my wife would murder me if I couldn’t get the house back in 24 hours. I want to use hardware that you can buy literally anywhere so I don’t need to keep a backup.
I’m not there yet, but I havve moved to running HA on a proxmox server and have used my HA backup to recover from a software failure. I’m now thinking about what the same would look like for a hardware failure, either the mini pc or the zigbee dongle.
If all you want is HA, green is the right answer.
I got a mini PC the beginning of this year and I have a bunch of stuff running on it now, in Proxmox. It's been a lot of complicated learning, but I've had fun.
Once this is edited, it'll be a great document.
But wow, maybe ask a friend to do it for ya.