I’m already hosting pihole, but i know there’s so much great stuff out there! I want to find some useful things that I can get my hands on. Thanks!
Edit: Thanks all! I’ve got a lil homelab setup going now with Pihole, Jellyfin, Paperless ngx, Yacht and YT-DL. Going to be looking into it more tomorrow, this is so much fun!
Home Assistant is nice! Have it integrated with some smart lights and smart plugs. Makes it easy to monitor and control everything locally.
We have it set up in our room so that one widget controls the lights, one controls the fans, one controls the monitors, then there’s a master button that we use to turn off everything that doesn’t need to be always on whenever we leave the room.
Want to play with some fancier stuff with it too, but that alone is incredibly convenient.
Do you have a recommendation for smart plugs and/or bulbs that work well w/Home Assistant and have decent security?
I wish Home assistant was more conducive to running on Kubernetes. I tried it but so much of the local discovery doesn’t work without being in the same LAN as all your IoT devices.
I run my instance via docker-compose, and it’s just a matter of setting network_mode: host on the container (in the YAML).
There’s an easy answer to that…don’t use IoT devices. I recently rebuilt my HA setup into a VM running on Proxmox, added a Zoos USB to ZWave dongle and then replaced every device that needed a network connection with a Z-Wave device. I have nothing left that needs, or can even connect to, the Internet and all of my routines / automations are fully local. I can turn my Router off and the only thing it will impact is remote access and voice control.
Do you have a recommendation for smart plugs and/or bulbs that work well w/Home Assistant and have decent security?
I recommend you stay away from anything that requires any kind of portal to setup. If you have to download an app and create an account in order to pair the device or get it setup then don’t use that equipment. There’s a near endless array of sensors and things you can get now that work using Z-Wave, ZigBee, and even HomeKit that work DIRECTLY with HA, meaning that they don’t require commands to be sent up to the cloud via the Internet and then come back down to your device.
I’ve used stuff from IKEA (TRÅDFRI). They work great with HomeAssistant but I should let someone else comment on their securityI suppose.
Honestly? I just grabbed the cheapest stuff I could find online, hah. Everything I use is basically a mishmash of whatever was on sale at the time. Home Assistant has worked with every device I’ve hooked up so far, and even when they’re different brands I’ve been able to group them up nicely in Home Assistant’s interface.
Can’t speak to security, unfortunately. While it’s certainly an important concern, my budget has been pretty limited to whatever I can find in multipacks for under $30 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
