Yeah, if you want to have it 'just work', a dedicated Pi seems fine, though I'm considering moving it onto my NAS if I get a usb Zigbee stick (I have one sitting on the pi's gpio pins).
I know I ran the motioneye service on the nas (docker container) as the Pi was struggling a bit, and to have more room to write the files. If you are already familiar with docker, you can totally run the add ons yourself.
And if you wanted, I think you can configure appdaemon to run without Home Assistant if you have something else running the MQTT service, so you could add the Zigbee2 add on (just a docker image https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/) and interact with it directly.
Zigbee2Mqtt does a great job supporting lots of devices (IKEA stuff for example), so I think you might just want to get a zigbee stick and go nuts on the MQTT instance yourself. Shouldn't be too hard to log the MQTT events into your custom dashboards.
You might not even want AppDaemon if you want to just code up an event loop yourself...?
But I'm pretty happy with the gui/yaml home assistant experience, as I mostly want fairly simple and predictable automations, and the dashboard is good for the whole family to use as well.
https://github.com/hassio-addons/addon-grafana
Yeah, if you want to have it 'just work', a dedicated Pi seems fine, though I'm considering moving it onto my NAS if I get a usb Zigbee stick (I have one sitting on the pi's gpio pins).
I know I ran the motioneye service on the nas (docker container) as the Pi was struggling a bit, and to have more room to write the files. If you are already familiar with docker, you can totally run the add ons yourself.
You can also write your own automations in python with HA https://appdaemon.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
And if you wanted, I think you can configure appdaemon to run without Home Assistant if you have something else running the MQTT service, so you could add the Zigbee2 add on (just a docker image https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/) and interact with it directly.
Zigbee2Mqtt does a great job supporting lots of devices (IKEA stuff for example), so I think you might just want to get a zigbee stick and go nuts on the MQTT instance yourself. Shouldn't be too hard to log the MQTT events into your custom dashboards.
You might not even want AppDaemon if you want to just code up an event loop yourself...?
But I'm pretty happy with the gui/yaml home assistant experience, as I mostly want fairly simple and predictable automations, and the dashboard is good for the whole family to use as well.