Adding to this as I’m also interested. I’m currently looking at cameras recommended in the Frigate wiki, since any camera that works well in Frigate also ought to work well in HA. One interesting thing I’ve noted is that some of the Hikvision and Dahua models have onboard AI features for object recognition. Does anyone have experience with these? Can they report these events back to home assistant and are they worth using?

One thing I’m curious about: Do you measure the idle power consumption of your NUC and does it really drop down to 6W? Because with a Hypervisor installed I would assume that it never really goes into „idle“ hence the resources are constantly bound.

I used a power metering plug to measure the consumption and it showed around 6W when no VMs were running. I think it’s probably higher now with HA online, as my UPS is showing a 5W increase over when the Pi was plugged in. (The UPS always shows a higher number than the power meter though, so I’m not sure which one to trust.) If the new figures are correct, the NUC appears to be using 10 watts with HA on. I’ll have to see if setting the CPU frequency governor to powersaving mode has any effect.

I considered bare metal HASSOS too and would have gone that route if HA were the only thing I was planning on running. Another option would have been to install a linux distro and run HA in docker, but having HA in its own separate VM means I don’t need to worry about accidentally breaking it when I’m messing around with other services.

Now, having written this, I realize that there would have been some real advantages in running HA in docker on a bare metal OS. For one, it would have made running Frigate easier, as its documentation recommends against running it in a VM.

NUC is a brand of mini PCs from Intel (or now Asus, I suppose.) I haven’t tried Lenovo mini PCs myself, but they fit the same niche.