Home assistant Pi, surveillance system, dedicated server?

Federico7 · September 17, 2021

Hi, in a few months i will leave my parents house and go in my new house. I already have some plans to how to set up my place there... The house need some adjustments since it was not designed with home automation in mind... anyway. I decided on some stuff but i have doubts on other...

Right now i plan on buy a Synology NAS (for example the DS920+) that will take care about foto, personal documents, video and will act as a Plex server (even though i will use Synology proprietary app)

I have some doubts about home assistant, i plan on using it in combination with homekit more or less... (i have ipad, iphone, apple watch... and probably i will also buy some new apple silicon laptop in near future..) and it is supposed to work with lights, door openings, room temperature, solar energy etc... and for this configuration a raspberry should still be enough.

My doubts are on the possibility to set some surveillance cameras... Recently i've been wondering about the possibility to integrate some cameras in home assistant, 4-5-6-7... and i'm afraid that adding that much is enough to abandon the little pi for something more performing... (also i have seen some video about setting up some alerts with person detection or even use face detection... but that will require a lot of resources....)

So..

- Should i use the pi with basic automation and set the cameras with Homekit (max 4 if i'm right) ?

- Use the Pi for basics and then set up a surveillance system with a dedicated hardware..?

- Give up on the Pi and rely on a more capable machine to work with that...? (suggestion on that)

- Spend more on the NAS and rely on that...?

The "server room" is near the bedroom so it was nice to have something silent (so not super loud servers) or even better totally passive that's why i was tempted by the NAS with ssd cache and by the raspberry with some heavy passive cooling case... If i will ever need something for example, space for gaming or work i will probably build a low cost pc with Unraid on it and call it a day. So that the nas will be dedicated for personal use and the server for professional use.