32 posts were merged into an existing topic: Home Assistant Blue start/stop / connect putty
Sorry for my quite late question concerning your message.
What kind of operating system do you use on the T630?
Windows embedded?
I think it is Debian, or maybe Ubuntu, but to be honest I cannot remember.
For the ease of use, I would use now Home Assistant OS. You can install that easily. I did on a second unit, but I haven’t migrated my HA yet.
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PSA: If you run any remote Home Assistant instances and are technically inclined, I would recommend a Supervised installation (on Debian) instead of Home Assistant OS. That way, it will be a lot easier to remotely restore HA if something went wrong after a bad update (etc.). Because you have a full Linux OS that HA is running on top off, rather than having HA be the OS itself.
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I’m actually using a RPi 3b, maybe you actually have an older one. For me it’s working just fine and I have quite a number integrations and automations setup. I have a smaller home and maybe have less devices than many. It’s a good enough place to start so long as you have a plan to upgrade later. I’m sure I will outgrow the RPI 3b in time but for now it’s acceptable.
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I’m dropping my experiences with running ‘Generic x86-64’ on an old laptop here. I managed to flash it directly to the old HDD. Next I’ll buy a new SSD (and flash that) and add more RAM, and maybe decapitate the monitor and run it headless;)
I went on eBay and got an older NUC… it’s a powerhouse and I LOVE IT! I am not in the Raspberry Pi camp… all that reading and writing to the SD Card really pounds on it. You can hook an external drive to the pi and read and write to that… that will work much better.
It’s an alternative… I like the NUC as it has so much more power. I flash it with HAOS and off I go… very quick.
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Does your preferred installation “our operating system” allow me to install integrations from the community store?
I just installed to a HAOS VM on Vmware Player and cannot access the integrations I need, Wiser & Warmup
I’m not quite sure what you are suggesting, maybe I should ditch HA and install OpenHAB where these components are readily available
All official integrations of HA are listed here:
I do not see Wiser there.
But there is a community store called HACS, which i referred to, and there I did found Wiser.
So, if you decide to use that integration, you first have to install HACS and the Wiser inside HACS.
You have to read the docs and determine, if this is, what you are looking for…
The ZimaBoard might be a cheap alternative with quad-core x86 and dual NICs. Plenty of performance for lots of devices, automations, and even a few add-ons: Building a Portable Server- Zima Board
That is a great price. Let us know how it works out. My brix with the same chipset is fantastic.
I’ve a mini PC (under the telly) for streaming services, photos and occasionally showing the wife my spreadsheets to justify my motorbike and gadget expenditure.
Can I install HA and continue to use the PC for the other things?
Also, I had a Phoscon Conbee 2 dongle that I tried and was happy with but sold it as HA was taking up too much of my time. I intend to replace it with the best dongle out there now ( and available in the UK) . Anyone know what is the best one to buy now
I bought a used Dell Wyse Thin Client Zx0 AMD G-T56N 1.65GHz 4GB RAM No HDD w/ Feet on ebay for $9.99 plus $10.23 shipping.
I was surprised when it arrived because it actually did have an SSD installed in it (64GB)
I installed Home Assistant OS NUC version on the SSD and it worked perfectly. Best 20 bucks I have spent in a while. Dell Wyse Thin Client Zx0 AMD G-T56N 1.65GHz 4GB RAM No HDD w/ Feet | eBay
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I think a user would have to be drunk to willingly confuse an operating system vendor with a supplier of IoT integration software (Home Assistant).
I use server grade hardware and the up time of the hardware is the same as that of the grid (which is very stable). The Internet is down more (due to idiots with excavators) than Home Assistant…
All those low power solutions sound nice in theory, but when you want to actually use a system, it’s nice when things are snappy.
For a new installation, Home Assistant - NixOS Wiki would be much more reliable than this project will ever create.
Whoever thought providing a specific operating system was a good idea clearly has no clue about business.
I have been actually using HA on my RPi 3B+ for going on four years now. It’s snappy, it does everything I want it to do, and connected to an inexpensive RPi UPS battery board it has survived a number of power outages and grid perturbations.
I understand the joy of running a server farm at home. Been there, done that. And if you want to do that, HA is a great excuse. Go for it.
But if you just want a simple, inexpensive device to run some home automation and monitoring, it’s certainly not necessary.
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And there is lots of hardware in between the ‘server grade’ and ‘raspberry’. I got down to a HP minidesk for not that much. Runs a little more then HA and consumes 25Watts which is very acceptable for the things it does. Server Grade consumes mostly way more energy, which is a bit against my whishes. And a raspberry experience is also i had and didnt like.
My migration from a pi4 to an upgraded ancient laptop which was collecting dust has really done wonders.
CPU seemed to be my main bottleneck which was killing my ESPHome compile times.
Runs at ~ 20-25W.