Inside the chunky ControlBox housing is a Raspberry Pi 5 4GB with a Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) solid-state drive (SSD) for storage — allowing it to act as a Home Assistant server itself, rather than as a client device. For those with existing Home Assistant installations, DomeCtrl promises a variant that uses an Espressif ESP32-powered WT32-ETH01 running the ESPHome firmware.

Ah, okay. So if anyone’s wondering why it’s so overpowered, that’s why. I was thinking an ESP32 could have easily handled that, and so did they. The Pi-5 powered one is to act as a HA server itself.