Tutorial: Home Assistant on Proxmox VE with an N100 Mini PC from Scratch

Traditional commercial home automation (Google Home, Alexa, Tuya, or Smart Life) has three serious structural problems: it depends on external cloud servers that can go down or become paid services, it slows down automations with unnecessary latency, and it monetizes the presence data and habits of your household. The definitive solution for any enthusiast is Home Assistant: an open-source automation brain that runs 100% locally on your own network.

As we saw in our guide to building your own home server and home lab, the standout combination in 2026 for unbeatable cost, stability, and power consumption is to use a Mini PC with an Intel Alder Lake-N100 processor under the Proxmox VE hypervisor. This setup lets you run Home Assistant OS with instant backups (snapshots), without interfering with other services such as Pi-hole, Plex, or Nextcloud.

1. The Ideal Hardware: Why the Intel N100 Crushes the Raspberry Pi

For years, the Raspberry Pi was the go-to starter standard. However, in 2026 a Mini PC with an Intel N100 processor, 16 GB of DDR4/DDR5 RAM, and a 512 GB NVMe SSD costs practically the same as a complete Raspberry Pi 5 kit with case, official power supply, and cooling, while offering overwhelming advantages:

• Ridiculously low idle consumption: It ranges between 6 W and 9 W plugged in 24 hours a day (less than €1.20 per month on your electricity bill).
• Reliable NVMe storage: The microSD cards used in ARM boards inevitably become corrupted by the Home Assistant database (continuous recording of sensor states). An NVMe SSD guarantees years of service life without failures.
• x86 power for virtualization: The N100 chip supports Intel QuickSync hardware transcoding, VT-x virtualization instructions, and allows you to run multiple virtual machines on Proxmox simultaneously.

2. Step 1: Installing Proxmox VE on the Mini PC

1. Download the official Proxmox VE 8.x ISO image from its official website and write it to a USB stick using tools such as BalenaEtcher or Rufus (DD mode).
2. Connect the Mini PC to your router with an Ethernet cable, insert the USB stick, and boot by pressing F7 / F11 to enter the BIOS boot menu.
3. Follow the installation wizard, assigning a static local IP (for example: 192.168.1.200) and set your root administrator password.
4. Once it has finished and rebooted, access the web console from any browser on your local network: https://192.168.1.200:8006.

3. Step 2: Automated Deployment of Home Assistant OS (HAOS)

The cleanest and most maintainable way to run Home Assistant is as a full Virtual Machine with HAOS, since it includes the official Supervisor for installing Add-ons with a single click. Thanks to the community’s Proxmox VE Helper-Scripts, the deployment takes less than two minutes:

1. In the Proxmox web interface, click on your server node and open the Shell tab.
2. Paste the official automated Home Assistant OS installation script:

   bash -c "$(wget -qLO - https://github.com/tteck/proxmox/raw/main/vm/haos-vm.sh)"

3. Accept the recommended configuration (2 CPU cores, 4 GB of RAM, and 32 GB of virtual storage on the SSD).
4. The script will download the latest official HAOS KVM image, create the virtual machine, and start it automatically.

4. Step 3: Passthrough of the Zigbee USB Coordinator

To connect door, presence, and temperature sensors or smart plugs without flooding your Wi-Fi, the Zigbee mesh network is the undisputed standard, as we explained in our guide to low-cost home automation with Zigbee sensors from AliExpress:

1. Plug your Zigbee coordinator dongle (recommended: Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus-E or SMLIGHT SLZB) into a USB port on the Mini PC, preferably using a 1-meter USB extension cable to keep it away from the processor’s electromagnetic interference.
2. In Proxmox VE, select the newly created Home Assistant virtual machine and go to the Hardware → Add → USB Device section.
3. Check the Use USB Vendor/Device ID option, select your Zigbee dongle, and click add. From that moment on, the virtual machine will have direct, exclusive physical access to the antenna.

5. Step 4: Startup and Cloud Backups

Open the address http://192.168.1.200:8123 in your browser (or port 8123 with the IP that the virtual machine has obtained). Follow the welcome wizard to create your administrator user and immediately enable the Home Assistant Google Drive Backup add-on from the Add-ons store: this add-on will create a compressed, encrypted backup of your entire configuration to your personal Google Drive account every night, 100% automatically.

The Trebellos Verdict

Investing an afternoon in setting up Home Assistant on an N100 Mini PC with Proxmox is the best qualitative leap you can make in your digital home: you get a smart home with instant response times in milliseconds, inviolable privacy, and a robust system that will keep turning on lights and running routines even if your ISP’s internet connection goes down.