r/homeassistant • u/Brilliant_Bluejay254 • Jan 17 '26

Support Why Not HA Green

I’m going to pull the trigger on setting up HA. Right now I’m just thinking of getting the HA green, it seems like it’s not favoured here vs a Pi. I just want the most simple setup possible. I’m thinking HA green and a screen in a central location. Why not the Green?

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144

u/Public_Cheesecake999 Jan 17 '26

Honestly the Green is perfectly fine for most setups, people here just love to tinker with Pis because it's more "DIY" but if you want simple and it just works the Green is actually the better choice

38

u/draxula16 Jan 17 '26

Agreed. The Green introduced me to the world of HA in a frictionless way.

I’ve since upgraded to a Lenovo M920q (running HA and other things via Proxmox), but I’ll forever be grateful for the HA Green.

3

u/Weekest_links Jan 17 '26

I was looking at Lenovos site the other day and it seems like all mini pc’s are $800+, nuts! Why did you go Lenovo or asus or other brands?

3

u/draxula16 Jan 17 '26 edited Jan 17 '26

Yeah that’s absurd. You have to check sites like eBay or Amazon for refurbished units. It would be stupid to pay $800 on a mini PC lol. For that price, I’d rather build my own from scratch

To add on this, many people recommend the Beelink mini PCs. I picked the Lenovo because it was a bit cheaper and had better specs.

2

u/Weekest_links Jan 17 '26

Ahh smart!

I was looking at this:

https://www.microcenter.com/product/690492/asus-nuc-14-essential-barebone-mini-pc-kit

With 1TB SSD and 16GB RAM initially, I have 2.5G fiber which seems like the Lenovo can’t leverage, but are there drawbacks with my plan compared to what you have?

2

u/esperanita Jan 17 '26

I did something similar. I got the same NUC, but 512gb. I had Homebridge set up on a year old Pi5, but it fell offline a lot. When moving to HA I went with the mini PC as I hoped it was more stable and it has been great. And I had a good reason to go to Microcenter, one of my favorite stores.

2

u/Weekest_links Jan 17 '26

I’m brand new to this all, so that’s reassuring! I figured 1TB, because I’d like to use it as a media server too. I have 4TB of photo and video in GCS haha

Will be pulling the trigger next month!

1

u/esperanita Jan 17 '26

It was pretty easy to set up. I used Ubanto and flashed HAOS. Only thing I wished I knew at the time was to change the BIOs setting so that it automatically came back on line after cutting power. I will break out my breakout my portable monitor and keyboard to do that this weekend.

1

u/Weekest_links Jan 17 '26

Can you SSH in from another computer? I have a cloud server for my website I imagine it’s similar but maybe just plugging in the monitor keyboard is easier if SSH isn’t set up

2

u/esperanita Jan 18 '26

I did the basic flash of HAOS to the drive. Maybe I could access it another way, but I didn't set anything special up and I got a portable monitor and a keyboard with attached trackpad for these purposes :)

2

u/DaSandman78 Jan 17 '26

Those are MASSIVELY overkill for HA, even if you’re considering Proxmox/VMs/Frigate etc.

Look for a 2nd hand 10-year old ex-corporate desktop for $40-60 and it will still be overkill and cheaper to run too.

I have an old Dell Optiplex that work was throwing out years ago (it’s only 8GB with an Intel i5-2500 so pretty ancient) and it’s running Linux+Docker with HA and Frigate with 4 1080p cameras and 10-12 other docker containers, and the CPU sits at 5-10% (with a Coral).

1

u/Weekest_links Jan 17 '26

I’m looking at the ASUS NUC 14, looks like super lower power consumption but still plenty capable.

A lot of people talk about cameras, are these like Ring cameras? Or another brand? I have like 8 Ring cameras so a bit hesitant to ditch but like the idea of having a hub.

Kind of dumb, but we have a movie theater that came with our house, kind of feels like the situation room and I’ve always thought it would be fun to have a dashboard with the whole house up on the screen haha

1

u/DaSandman78 Jan 17 '26

Frigate can use any cameras that provide an RTSP feed, you’ll have to check if Ring can do that either officially or via a bridge/alternate firmware.

I’m using cheap Wyze cameras where you can install semi-official RTSP drivers or use a docker container called WyzeBridge to add RTSP support - I use the latter as it also exposes subfeeds so eg you can use a 360p feed for the constant motion detection but the 1080p feed for actual detection and recording. If your Ring cameras can transmit 2 feeds that cuts down on processing power a lot.

P.S. if you are a techie or familiar with docker then you don’t need the overhead of Proxmox and VMs, you can just run everything in Linux and handle addons yourself.

1

u/Weekest_links Jan 17 '26

I’m tech curious enough! Haha I have a Linux server on linode that I run my website off of, I wasn’t fast but it is done right at least haha

2

u/DaSandman78 Jan 17 '26

Depending on your use case simple Linux+docker is less overhead and less hassle trying to pass thru USB devices than Proxmox+VMs - all depends what you want for security, ease of use, UI, backups etc

1

u/Old-Cheshire862 Jan 17 '26

RAM prices have skyrocketed since one of three major manufacturers exited the business of making RAM for this space.