comments:
RPi is a great power-efficient way to dip your toes in. I had one laying around and unused and it has served me well for 6 years. I wouldn't start out with it today as a new purchase as there are better options (like refurb SFF desktops). Simple example is this refurb HP SFF with 16GB of RAM and 256GB of SSD. It's not a "great price" but pretty average for the current market. But it's a way better deal IMHO than an RPi4 or RPi5 where you have to buy storage, etc., and you'll have way more CPU available later on if/when you move to more intense tasks and/or Proxmox to share the system. Consider this:https://www.walmart.com/ip/Restored-HP-ProDesk-600-G4-SFF-Small-Form-Factor-Desktop-8th-Gen-Intel-Core-i5-8500-6-Cores-Processor-16GB-DDR4-RAM-256GB-SSD-UHD-Graphics-630-Window/1352205555 Careful, HA is a gateway drug... next think you know you're dropping "big money" upgrading everything like I've just started to do in my move to Proxmox: https://www.reddit.com/r/Proxmox/comments/1ubcgtl/migrating_from_a_couple_rpi4_to_nucsff_and_proxmox/ Second note that I'm sure others will share: look for cloud-free devices. That's the real beauty in HomeAassistant: it works even if they company stops supporting it or if your Internet is down.