If you want to run EspHome inside HA, and you recompile the devices (every release of EH), you want a decent processor/disk. The ESP stuff is a surprisingly heavy compile for a puny microcontroller.

A recent RPi is sufficient to handle a few plants - though, yes, recompilation will take time. The ESP is a beautiful piece of software, hence I highly recommend it. My native language has an expression that describes this situation perfectly: the appetite grows with eating. Next thing you know you have 2k or more entities, and your HA even handles some video feeds.

The important thing is that it's pretty much always easy to make an upgrade thanks to the good design of the backup system. Don't forget to set up backups in either case, it's a sin to not use such a complete system :)

Recompilation has nothing, or should have nothing, to do with the requirements to run the system. If that is indeed a requirement then the system is indeed bonkers.

For a system handling sensors and actuators you should be able to run a farm off a RPi in terms of compute power. Quad-core at 2.4 GHz and up to 16 GiB RAM on a RPi 5, that's a crazy amount of compute for the use-case.

The way ESPHome works is that your device configuration is a yaml file that produces a compiled binary artifact and it can be updated OTA with wifi. The downside of this is that these updates are pushed via the device you are running HAOS and hence compiling can take a while.

HAOS is quite bloated but it's also very versatile and FOSS

There's no reason you have to run ESPHome on your Home Assistant server.

It's offered as a HA a̵d̵d̵o̵n̵ app for ease of use (makes it a one-click install), but you can also just `pip install esphome` or use the provided Docker image and get the exact same UI, but with everything (including compilation) running on your much beefier laptop.

So your binaries get compiled quickly and you can still do the OTAs directly from your laptop. HA needn't be involved.

Thanks for explaining. So that's compiling code for an ESP32 once in a blue moon? Bonkers indeed if that's considered a limitation.

Every time you make a change to your yaml it requires a recompile. I think now ESP Home allows you to change configurations and upload a bin compiled on your main machine so it's really not a limitation at all. Plus, once it recompiles it automagically uploads so just make your changes and forget about it

Home Assistant is indeed a massive pile of software, mostly Python. I couldn’t get it to work reliably (or, at least, usably - the web interface was painful to use) on a Pi Zero because of memory requirements and disk access speed.

…having said that, as the other poster alludes to, it’s peak requirements that are problematic. If your device can handle them, it’s not a massive power suck because idle requirmements are low.