I wanted to shared my enthusiasm, which makes me feel like a little boy (despite me being 50+) fascinated by how such complex systems can be managed so easily by novices. I started using Proxmox recently. I had a machine running one VM with various docker images installed. But NVMe was tiny. So I setup another node and got it to share the same NFS share on the NAS, where I had saved full backups of the VM. Once added the NFS share to the new node (with a bigger ZFS local partition) I simply restored the VM from the NFS share that had been backed up from the original node. It seemlessly imported and started. Then I cloned on the new node so that I could get it on the new ZFS partition. Now the next task is to get a bigger NVMe on the original machine, install Proxmox from scratch, and add to cluster so that it shared the backup NFS share. I just then need to understand how to get HA up and running so that VMs are always synced flawlessly. Proxmox is super brilliant. I feel like I have a data center at home :-) I could not imagine this system was so flexible and relatively easy to use. The people that deliver and contribute to this stuf are super cool. A couple of proxmox nodes, a Truenas scale NAS and a good backup strategy and your data is really safe and rock solid … I hope :-)
It is as vast and customizable as it gets. The sky, and your imagination, is the limit. I’ve been at it for years and i’m still tinkering with automations and services. It’s biggest strength, in my eyes, is being able to run everything local and off line. My advice is to start with zigbee so as to not congest your Wi-Fi traffic and add in zwave where the budget allows and range is needed.
Can you run an automatic chicken door with that? Last time I looked, DIY arduino was the way, but a zwave mechanism with homeassistant automation sounds excellent.
When i say that imagination is the limit i mean it. I ordered some car seat pressure sensors and soldered them to either end of a door contact sensor and put them under our couch cushions. Now i have a battery powered, zigbee based, way to override the motion based automation if we’re on the couch. The lights stay on if we’re too still or they stay off if we’re napping and a pet walks in.
I watched a video where a guy used meshtastic to reach the back of his property and those radios can run on solar.
Cool! But why stop there?
Add automation to the sensors that turn on the disco lights when there’s couch nookie goin’ on!
Matter over thread works well too and is propably the most future proof option. The new ikea stuff is really cheap and mostly thread only. :) smlight slzb ultima3 hub will do both zigbee and thread simultaniously.
I hadn’t realised that matter was making such progress. I was about to start installing KNEX stuff at my home, which I would later integrate with Zigbee or the other stuff.
I don’t doubt thread is getting better and could be the more future proof of them all but i bought some zigbee motion sensors for less than $10 and haven’t changed the battery in them in nearly two years. When thread devices are that cheap and can run on battery that long i’ll gladly recommend them too. For now, for beginners, i like to recommend zigbee for it’s low cost in both money and power usage.