I’m planning to build several WiFi connected devices for home automation: an AC remote control and air quality sensors. These devices would send data and be controlled through a local server. I’m considering two approaches: running custom software on a server PC (hardware to be determined) or integrating with Home Assistant’s protocols and purchasing their hardware. Would using Home Assistant be excessive for this use case?
Just be careful with SD cards if you’re using SBCs. Home Assistant does a lot of writing and if your SD card can’t handle repeated writes you may suddenly lose everything. Keep backups to another device and have a replacement SD card ready if extended downtime is going to be a problem for you.
Always run mine in a VM along with everything else, no need for special hardware.
Get yourself a PoE Zigbee and/or Z-wave receiver and you are good to go, can even live migrate HA if you are fancy
Booting from USB drives has worked well for me