An update on my use Home Assistant, I’m no longer running it inside Podman as detailed here. In fact, I’m no longer running it on the NUC at all. Instead, I bought myself a Home Assistant Blue. I bought the ‘dev mode’ version just in case I want to tinker with things further, but I could have gone with the ‘Zen mode’ version just as easily.

The ODROID-N2+ is remarkably capable and having the entire stack being HA-managed (Home Assistant OS, running Home Assistant Supervisor, running Home Assistant Core) is a dream. It really Just Works™ and I’ve not had any issues over the few months it’s been running. I used the add-on store to have it launch a MariaDB container and moved the ‘recorder’ component it with a simple config tweak (and sped up startup time almost 4x in the process). I’ve since added the community store (HACS) and a bunch of automations and it still just keeps chugging along. At the moment, I’ve got 22 integrations, 49 devices, 10 areas, and ~372 entities and my system dashboard looks like:

If you’re considering taking the plunge into home automation, I can very easily recommend getting a Blue.