I am building a new house. Lighting will be controlled by Lutron RadioRa3. For general automation I am contemplating Home Assistant – in part because of the Lutron integration. I basically have two questions before I decide to go that direction and I hope this is the right place to post them.
The first is: What am I likely to need YAML for? I don’t know YAML and, while there are plenty of things I am interested in learning, YAML isn’t one of them. I don’t want home automation to be a hobby (and my wife certainly doesn’t). I want it to be set up and work like an appliance, kind of like my refrigerator. I know there are drop down boxes I can use for quite a bit of “if this and that then do this.” But on the other hand I see a lot of threads like this https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/1iqafl9/it_keeps_getting_better/?post_fullname=t3_1iqafl9&post_index=2
where people are doing things with YAML to create dashboards and stuff, which suggests it can’t be done without YAML.
So, just what am I likely to need YAML for? For example, if I have two sensors in a hallway and want to turn on lights in a room when the sensors are triggered in a particular order (like someone walking down the hallway in one direction and not the other), would I need YAML for that? And what about creating dashboards for controlling things and getting notifications on my phone? Ideally I’d like a GUI where I can drag and drop devices to buttons etc. instead of learning to code.
The second question is hardware related. I am considering a core 3 100U NUC. I know that is overkill just for HA and I could run it on a Raspberry Pi, but the NUC isn’t much more expensive and I want to have cameras with some AI to distinguish between people, cars and animals and I thought the additional processing power would be useful for that and might be snappier for voice control. In addition, I’d like to have a media server and I really don’t want to have multiple pieces of hardware running 24/7 like one for HA, another with windows for Blue Iris, and a separate NAS. I’d like one little low powered box.
Is that doable without getting into virtual machines where I have HA running under one and another OS under a different VM? Is there a media server app that integrates with HA? Again I am looking for simplicity. Any input is appreciated.
Thanks for your insight.
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