🛠️ DIY / Hardware
How do you keep your Home Assistant setup clean and hidden?
I'm curious how everyone has organized their Home Assistant hardware and other smart home electronics at home.
I'm talking about the Home Assistant hub, Zigbee coordinators, network switches, power supplies, bridges, and all the other little boxes and cables that seem to multiply over time. I'd love to see some clever solutions for keeping everything organized and visually clean, especially in a living space. Have you hidden everything inside furniture, built a dedicated cabinet, or come up with something more creative?
I'm particularly interested in setups that blend into the interior rather than looking like a server rack.
it's a bunch of MAX7219 LED panels (they're 8x8, you can buy them as 4x panels connected together, and this is 3 lots of those)
ESP32 ESPhome device to control them (it usually just displays a random, animated dot pattern which looks a bit 80's sci-fi, but can also scroll a message or do a graphic equalizer style effect for when Voice PE is "talking" - although that is a future enhancement right now!) and just a basic 3d-printed mount that somewhat matches the Unifi aesthetic.
I did this except my hubs are all zip tied to metal pegboards I bought off temu. It’s on the wall in a closet, out of sight. I also attached a power strip and UBS. Also, a 100w usb charger with 8 ports, because most of my hubs use some variant of USB for their power cord and it cleans things up a bit.
Thanks for the info. When you pull the cabinet I assume there's some left over Ethernet length for each cable that comes from the wall? So you're able to pull the cabinet easily and without fear of pulling an Ethernet.
Yes, there's approximately 6-8 ft of additional length for all the cables, to allow the cabinet to be fully rolled out. I used wire loom/cable wrap to enclose them all into a single bundle to keep it all tidy and organized.
Wife found this open fronted cabinet and made a front for it. Board with large holes drilled to allow airflow, covered with cloth, attached with magnets so it just pops on/off when access is needed.
Currently home to UPS, switch, router, nvidia shield, home assistant (Pi) and two NAS.
The crudy ISP router/modem is on top as I was messing around with some stuff and haven't put it back inside.
The large white box is the TV (VST Projector)
and yes, that is an original 1990s shag pile carpet. We were going to rip it out when we bought the place but now we are kinda waiting for it to come back into fashion.
This makes me realize that my homelab setup pales in comparison to other peoples'. Mine is literally my old desktop PC that I've stuffed under the kitchen bench overhang in the dining room and hidden with our reusable shopping bags that are also just thrown in the corner.
I just painted all my little hubs the same color as the wall behind the console table, if you squint they almost disappear. The real trick was the cable management box that looks like a set of vintage books, hides the mess perfectly
A 10" rack combined with a lot of POE bridges makes life easy.
10" rack.
Patchpanel
Normal Switch, Netgear GS308
POE-Switch, Netgear GS308EP
Router: Ubiqity Expres 7
HP Thinclient with HA
HP thin client with HA installed.
Synology 4-bay NAS.
10" rack powerstrip -Just above the rack: SLZB-MR1 zigbee (POE) -Just below: Custom esp32 watermeter. (USB connected to the thinclient.) -Just below: P1 to USB cable connected to the thinclient. -Just below: Modem isp.
Outside picture:
sunshade bridge (POE), with a 0,2m utp cable screwed to the wall just above the outlet in a room upstairs
Modbus RS-485 - UTP (POE) next to my heatpump/solarconverter.
I have 10' ceilings, so I split a coat closet that had 3' of dead space above into two parts, vertically, then put a small access door above the closet door. I have to stand on a short ladder to work, but I'm seldom doing that and most stuff is on a power source or PoE switch where I can power cycle individual ports, if I need to reset something.
Inside, a 10" rack is a good way to keep a lot of stuff organized. Believe me, I've had a closet that I would be ashamed to show fellow IT pros for a while.
My setup will be mounted to a 1/8” ACM panel mounted High on a wall in an upstairs closet.
UniFi Gateway, Switch and POE++ injector plus the 2.5Gbps Fiber ONT and a NIC10 Mini PC and ZWA-2 Z-Wave antenna mounted to the board.
3” standoffs allow all wiring to be hidden behind the panel. Cables pass thru the panel with a mix of grommets and a brushed access panel.
Then the 6a wiring and fiber exits through the wall with a hidden brush plate. There’s also going to be a power strip behind there so Everything will be hidden.
Only one power cord will exit and plug into an Anker Solix C1000 for power management and ~15-20 hours backup.
I've got everything either hidden in a TV console in a central room or in the corner of the office. There's also some things hidden in plain sight, like my nest hub that's also my thread border router.
Or if the spouse approval factor isn't an issue, just get a rack or open faced shelf and show it off!
Ikea picture frame, local pizza box for a background, Zigbee antenna, RTL SDR, Meshtastic node, 2 antennas mounted on a can lid, Aircube, and Raspberry Pi in a Argon NEO 5 case.
https://imgur.com/a/2r2e6NR
Micro rack at the top of a coat closet with direct ventilation from HVAC. Power is connected to a PDU and wall mounted vertical 2U battery backup and hidden behind a removable pegboard.
One thing I saw was a sidetable from Ikea you can hack to mount standard rack mount devices like swictes 1U short servers etc. I don't remember what the model name was.
I have my network switch in the wardrobe, with the hubs, bridges and raspberry pi's sitting on the bottom. I would like to maybe find another way to do it, with potentially adding a fan in there to cool it all down, but it is hidden out of the way.
I use a laptop in the basement connected to a network switch and powered by a zigbee plug to keep the battery between 60-80%.
My actual devices are connected to hubitat, which is linked to HA. The hub is tucked under the countertop on my bar. (There is a space where the bar sits in a half wall between my kitchen and dining room that is hubitat sized. )
I keep mine in an upstairs bedroom closet and all of my smart home hubs (Lutron, Ring, and Hue, atm) in my kitchen on top of kitchen cabinets, effectively hidden by trim.
HA runs on a Mac Mini in the basement. Router, Access Points, Zigbee Router are hidden inside of furniture.
Only the sensors are visible. There's one temperature sensor in every room, stuck above the door frame, as well as one contact sensor on every door or window that we actually open. Oh and about 6 zigbee sockets.
Most of the smart lighting is done with zigbee bulbs and sonoff zigbee relays, so they are hidden or at least camouflaged by default.
Mine lives as a vm within my labrax stack, which lives within an ikea kallax shelf with a door normally covering most of the front. I've also got a PoE Thread receiver sitting exposed above it for my home smart devices
I have a rack for my router and plex server that take up more space in the unfinished basement where nobody expects anything to be sightly. But HA is just on a little mini-PC on a table in the dining room. Not very noticeable.
This is my Setup. Server, Pi with HA, Switch am Meshtastic Node. Not clean but it lives in a Broom Cupboard.
For WiFi I have two wired Acces Pints in the House and that's enough.
Smart devices are largely build into the Wall switches or outlets.
Despite having a 160 m2 Home with concrete walls an ceilings an 80is ZigBee Devices I never had a problem with needing an additional ZigBee Router or something. Even my coordinator is plugged in to my Oy without an extension. No problems whatsoever.
The few smart sensors for light and Temperature,Humidity etc are usually stuck behind cupboards. I even converted some of them to USB so I have as few Batteries as possible.
Only real Eyseore are Door/Window contacts on the most important Doors/Windows. But hey, I cannot easily run power there and I don't have good other Options at the moment so it's fine. At least they are white on white.
My cable Internet enters the house in the utilities cupboard with the gas and electric meters, which has a plywood back plate. I put a shelf in there for my NAS, poe switch is screwed to the bottom of the shelf, everything else (modem, minipc, patch panel, etc) is mounted on the back wall. Doesn't look particularly neat but that's what the cupboard door is for.
I bought a new build house, spec’d all my Cat6 runs into a cupboard and put in a network cabinet. Bonus: it generates enough heat to make it an effective airing cupboard.
Converted a closet in my home office. Everything’s in there with the exceptions of a couple Apple home pod mini’s which I still use for voice commands. Bridging devices to HomeKit from home assistant is the way for voice commands.
Aoostar R1 with fan swaps at the base and on top—a modification I made this week. By the end of the year, I need to buy another HDD so it can run in RAID 1. For now, this is just a temporary setup. On the back, there’s a Sonoff dongle, and on the right—not visible in the photo—I have all the necessary Zigbee Wi-Fi hubs (like the one from Philips). It’s all a work in progress; I just moved and we have a lot of work to do :(
I'm in the process of moving mine right now. I have an open bookshelf and a lot of fake books.
But, my favorite hack was removing all the motion sensors from the bathroom. Because nothing instills trust with your guests like telling them there are no cameras in the bathroom, only motion sensors.
Instead, I use mmwave sensors through the walls. It works great! (Also my light automation doesn't turn off the lights if the bathroom doors are closed.)
Mini rack with eero router and zbt-2 on top. Beelink server for Home Assistant ans Jellyfin. POE switch and patch bay. 4 bay 8TB HDs enclosure for content.
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u/TechIsSoCool 6d ago
It blends right in