Spec sheet
One hub, a lot of radios.
Home Assistant runs the whole house. Every protocol, camera and voice assistant reports into it, and every automation lives there. I started with X10 more than fifteen years ago, and the setup has been growing (and occasionally shrinking) ever since.
| HUB | Home Assistant OS |
| HARDWARE | Dell Wyse thin client |
| AUTOMATIONS | 235 |
| ENTITIES | ~2,900 |
| AREAS | 22 on 4 floors |
| RADIOS | Z-Wave · Zigbee · Thread · BLE · SDR |
System layers
L1 / HUB
Home Assistant
Home Assistant OS installed bare-metal on a Dell Wyse thin client. Node-RED handles a few flows, and the ESPHome builder covers the sensors I make myself.
L2 / RADIOS
Z-Wave, Zigbee, Thread
Z-Wave on a Zooz ZST39 LR, about 28 nodes. Zigbee through Zigbee2MQTT. Thread through the OpenThread Border Router, with Matterbridge exposing everything else to Matter. ESPHome Bluetooth proxies cover BLE, and an RTL-SDR reads the gas meter and weather station.
L3 / CAMERAS
Frigate NVR
Frigate on a UGREEN NAS does object detection for ten cameras: Reolink on an NVR and a Home Hub Pro, an Aqara G400 doorbell and G5 Pro, and a SwitchBot. The Reolink NVR keeps the long-term recordings.
L4 / VOICE + AI
Local voice and Alfred
Home Assistant Voice with Whisper, Piper and openWakeWord running locally. Alfred, my AI agent, reads Home Assistant’s logs over MCP and tells me what broke before I notice.
L5 / LIGHTING
Govee and WLED
Most of the color lighting is Govee, bridged into Home Assistant over MQTT and Bluetooth, plus WLED controllers and permanent holiday lights outside.
L6 / LOCKS + SENSORS
Access and sensing
An Aqara U400 lock over Matter and Thread. Z-Wave and Zigbee sensors for doors and motion, and ESPHome builds for the things nobody sells.
L7 / NETWORK + SERVERS
The rack
A UniFi network, two Proxmox hosts for everything that isn’t Home Assistant, the UGREEN NAS for storage and Frigate, and a UPS that Home Assistant watches through NUT.
L8 / WORKSHOP
3D printing
Two Bambu Lab printers, an X1 Carbon and a P1S, make the enclosures, mounts and brackets that hold all of this together.
Retired
X10, Insteon, a SmartThings hub, the Xiaomi gateway, and the Raspberry Pi that used to run Home Assistant. If an older video shows one of these, that’s why it isn’t on this page anymore.
Watch it get built.
Every layer on this page has shown up in a video. Some of the gear was sent by brands. Here’s how that works.