Extensible setup advice for lights, cameras, actuators, local ai and voice

[winter pike]

I’m starting a 100% local Home Assistant journey for a 550m² stone home. The setup must be extensible, covering:

• ~180 LED bulbs + strips. Moving toward smart switches or Zigbee/Matter bulbs to replace traditional switches.
• Greenhouse window/heater, soil moisture/irrigation automation.
• 8 Hikvision analog cameras via NVR. Plan to offload motion detection to NVR, sending events to Frigate to reduce overhead, potentially including ANPR.
• Local voice assistant and LLM.
• Automations
• Potentially AdGuard host and NAS/Media server (optional).

I expect a Pi 5 is insufficient. I’m considering an Intel N100 (16GB) or Beelink EQi12. I’m aware the Coral TPU is no longer actively maintained but may still be useful for Frigate vs OpenVINO?

Questions:

• Which server/spec do you recommend for this specific load?
• Is there a "gotcha" in the Hikvision NVR → Frigate event pipeline?
• For a stone home of this size, are there specific Zigbee coordinators or repeaters that perform better?
• What should I be aware of that might "catch me out" with this specific local AI + high device-count setup?

Thx!

I should add that in the short term I will need it to work with some existing Wi-Fi LED controllers and floodlight controllers. I may add a HA controlled Electric gate and garage door at some point in the future.

Until I’ve got the whole system set up, I’ll likely use cloud based voice assistance in the interim with a bunch of Sonos speakers as the microphones until I set up a microphone mesh.

[pulsar girder]

both mini pc's would do great. Don't buy Tuya. Go Zigbee if possible. Use the new home assistant antenna or e.g. smlight slzb-06, which can be powered over PoE, usefull for good placement. There are tons of apps you can install in ha, maybe take a closer look at music assistant.

And take a look at nabu casa, home assistant's cloud service. Including online encrypted backups, external access, good voice part build in. And supporting ha ofc.

for your zigbee network, you can add several powerplugs or lightbulbs,most of them act as repeater, making mesh better

hehe, should have started with: Hi, welcome!!

on mini pc it would be best to run proxmoxve as os, and run home assistant as virtual machine on that. This will allow you to install your plex stuff, your samba server and backup location etc. beside ha

[winter pike]

That’s wonderful, thank you 🙂

Are those mini pcs overkill, or about right for what I need?

[pulsar girder]

about right

if use proxmox that's fine. for ha only it would be a bit overkill

[winter pike]

Sorry, just checking back in on this - would you go 16GB or 32GB?

Bear in mind 8 cameras on Frigate with AI object detection, ANPR, a few proxmox VMs and LXCs, local LLM and voice assistant, and a few additional services. I’m going to ditch the Plex idea.