The production instance of Home Assistant is running via the Home Assistant Operating System on an old MacBook Pro, with a remote instance running on another old MacBook Pro which has multiple USB radios connected (Currently Zigbee, Z-Wave, and an RTL-SDR dongle for 433mhz devices).
This is done for multiple reasons:
- Allow HA to communicate directly with wireless devices without the need for an external hub.
- Prevent having to pass USB devices through to virtual machines.
- Enable VMware to migrate the main HA VM across hosts within the cluster based upon load.
- Place radios in a more central location with better reception.
This is pending a refresh. The following tasks are planned:
- Migrate back to a VM. (However, I have converted all of my VMware hosts to Proxmox.)
- Migrate radios to strategically placed Raspberry Pi's. (Host management is the issue there.)
Instances are linked together using Lukas Hetzenecker's home-assistant-remote custom_component, which allows for all configuration to be completed within Home Assistant, without the need to worry about using USB/IP or socat to push the devices over the network. I've looked into using MQTT discovery, but the issue is advertisement intervals. Devices show up instantly with the homeassistant-remote component, even after restarts.
This configuration controls a couple of significant features in my smart home.
- Alarm Clock using my bedroom lights and TV
- Turning on/off lights at sunset/sunrise
- Arming the alarm system when nobody is home
- Security lighting when motion is detected at my front door
Note: Private information is stored in secrets.yaml (not uploaded)