So I’m looking to purchase a house soon, and before I paint I want to set up wiring in the house for a cloud-free smart home.
I currently rent an apartment. I have a home server running unraid with home assistant, and can run whatever server software I want to run. I’m looking at upgrading to a townhouse. Before I have someone come in and paint, I want to wire things for my ideal smart home.
My main focus will be networking and speakers.
I want to set up a server closet for my lab. I plan to get mikrotik switches. I currently plan on using tp-link omada APs for each floor.
I’m less confident in the speaker setup.
System Audio Inputs:
- TV in living room
- TV in bedroom
- Computer in office
- Computer in bedroom#2
- Any mobile device
audio out:
- Living room
- office
- bedroom (x2)
- kitchen
- primary bathroom
I’m imagining having a receiver for all the TV inputs/outputs and a central one for the bathroom, kitchen. I’m unsure about the office.
Cost is not a problem, I’m okay with 10-15k on the equipment for this.
What kind of amps/receivers would work best?
Not audio specific but…
Shelly products (smart relays, plugs, sensors, etc.) all work over local network control and I’ve been very happy with them. I have a bunch throughout the house, and they are all denied internet access at the network level.
Also, all HomeKit devices must, by the specification, allow local control. You should be able to use those devices locally using the Home Assistant HomeKit Device integration without having any Apple devices. My Ecobee thermostats work great through this integration even though they are also denied internet access.
Good luck, and have fun nerding out on your new home!
Just adding a few thoughts:
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If you already use Omada for APs it might be worth it to use their switches as well. Makes networking fairly easy. MKs are nice (I use them together with Omada myself),but basically everything you would need can be achieved with the Omada Switches as well. Only for the actual Gateway/Firewall I would rather go with OPNsense or, in a pinch, MK, with the later being inferior to OPNsense.
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Multiroom Audio I would very much recommend Amplipi, but I also might add that central audio with reasonably high quality is not as easy as it sounds electrically - I have seen more than a few installations that failed due to induction from other sources, timing issues,etc. It is sadly harder than one would think. It gets much much much harder for TV/motion picture relevant things as things are even more timing sensitive then.
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have a look at KNX for all smart home related things. It’s the gold standard.
For whole-home audio, be sure to look at Lyrion! Formerly Logitech Media Server, it’s now a community-managed project. It’s easily the best open-source whole-home audio solution out there
Look into Snapcast
My personal setup for 4 rooms worth of speakers is a rpi with a Hifiberry hat running debian with Mopidy. I use the Iris plugin for a front end and i mount my music directory via cifs on each pi
