Hey all, I’m about to re-deploy automation in my home. I had previously ran Openhab on a RPi at my small condo (with about 6 Insteon switches/outlets and a few other things). My plan (for now at least) is to deploy this instance on my newly built Unraid server as a Docker. I’ve been googling around to see if there is a better solution and in my searches it seems there’s a slight preference to Home-Assistant. I was curious if there was a strong preference for one or the other in this community (or some other one I didn’t happen across). I’d be very curious to hear any strong opinions, gotchas you discovered along the way or anything.
If it is relevant to the responses: I’m planning to use the same 2413 Insteon USB modem and I’ve installed the 2477D dimmers all over the house. I have a box of open/close sensors and leak sensors ready for the first stage’s completion and I use Google Assistant all over the place (generally a google/!apple/!amazon guy but I do have Ecobees).
I started with OpenHab, spent an enormous amount of time on it and got no where. Switched to Home Assistant based on a recommendation here, and never looked back. I was up and running that same night.
I’ve been working with HA for about a year now, and have a ton of stuff integrated with it. Been coding up some custom stuff with ESP23/8266, Kasa light switches, Tuya/off-brand wifi outlets, Yi cameras, and a ton of other integrations that worked literally out of the box.
I am running HA on a Virtualbox VM on my server which I downloaded from HA site: Installing Home Assistant OS - Home Assistant I downloaded the VMDK and converted and expanded the disk because the default 5/10GB wasn’t nearly enough.
I hear more and more people using it, so I’d have to agree with Sean that everyone seems to be converging on HA.
As for running it as docker, you can do that, but I have found that using HassOS instead of just the container option gave me so many more useful tools and the ability to run dockerized apps provided via HA. While Unraid/other platforms can do that, some of them are really nice to have deeply integrated into HA. For instance, I use ESPHome for my dev stuff for custom stuff.
This sounds like my story. it’s actually, probably quite telling that I’m even considering of switching considering the time invested thus far. I got to where I wanted with Openhab but it was a much smaller installation (2 bedroom apartment with 6 total devices) and i think the dread of enacting it on a larger scale encouraged me to research alternatives. Also figured it was the perfect time to switch if I was ever going to.
I’m very interested in this setup as a VM and not just the Docker. Were you running into issues getting the dockers to communicate with each other?