Darren Poulson has had an automated home for a rather long time. He migrated to Home Assistant and describes the process of moving all previous hardware and automations to the new platform.

Home Assistant has been around for a while, but I was loathe to move from OpenHAB as I already had a lot set up. However, as OpenHAB fell behind I finally bit the bullet and installed HAOS on a spare Raspberry Pi. This turned out to be a good thing.

The main core of the system is a Raspberry Pi 4 running Home Assistant OS. This is a simple install onto a Pi and is fully managed by Home Assistant. Everything runs in containers and gives you everything you need to get started.

The Pi is run from PoE in a rack, to keep things simple, and also has everything installed onto an SSD drive as it is a lot more reliable that using an SD Card (My old OpenHAB system was on SD Card and I had to rebuild it every now and again as the SD card wore out). Plugged into the Pi are two USB dongles, one for z-wave and one for Zigbee/Matter. This direct connection lets me control the majority of the devices I have.

I have a second Pi 4 running a system called Frigate. This is an open source CCTV system that integrates really nicely with Home Assistant.

Check out the systems and how they are managed in the post here.