[late_groomer]

Home Assistant has been nothing short of amazing. I started out just wanting to control my Christmas lights back in early December; tried going the HomeKit with HomeBridge route, only to realize I needed an iHub or some other (i) device on my network to have it work remotely. It was a bad experience even while on my network, luckily stumbled upon Home Assistant looking for better options a week or so into the journey. Now I'm controlling everything, even watching my security cameras, through HA.

The one caveat in my experience has been trying to run Pi-Hole on the same server as HA Supervised or using Adguard Home. Trying to run HA and PiH, even though they were both in docker containers, caused the Pi 3B+ to freeze every few hours. HA makes it clear running anything else is a bad idea, and that proved correct. I deleted PiH and tried the Adguard Home addon for my DNS for awhile, it was really slick and had a lot of features, but I found myself missing the PiH for several reasons. For one, it really sucked to be tinkering with HA while other people on the network were on the web; every time I needed to restart HA (which was often setting up the cameras), I'd get constant groaning and moaning about the internet being out. I also found it harder to control white/black lists; adding individual sites here and there was not as simple as it is in PiH. It also lacked the simple "disable for X minutes/seconds" feature I used so much.

I ended up installing just PiH on the Pi 3B+ and grabbing a cheap Chromebox off ebay to run HA. All the things I was doing on HA really pushed the Pi at times and I read one too many stories about SD cards dying from heavy use. Now everything is zippy and I feel safer with HA installed on the internal M.2 SSD.

[sam345]

I've had luck running HA and node red on a pi 3 but with 250gb SSD drive, responsive and reliable. I think that's the bottleneck. You can't use SD card. Also must use AC adapters specifically for pi, usually slightly above 5 volts and 2 amps I think. Also pinhole must be on separate device I agree with that.

[late_groomer]

Yep, I could have made it a better situation with some extra addition$ (I always put my Pi on a quality AC adapter from the start, those constant command line voltage nag warnings had their intended effect), but the cost of the SSD + another Pi is actually more than a used SFF device with a substantially more powerful Intel processor that comes with a M.2 SSD. It's amazing what you can get for < $50 these days. Great time to be alive for us tinkerers!