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.
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.
I see multiple recommendations for Odroid N2+. I’ve run HA on multiple platforms. Raspberry pi works, but its performance is lacking. The intel stuff takes too much power for a smart home controller. I support multiple family member all using Odroid N2+ with USB dongle for zigbee/zwave integration and have had no issues over multiple years. I believe the N2+ 4G memory is the best option when power, cost and performance are used to drive the decision. While I’m partial this is the route I’d go to get a debian bullseye image. The guys on the site that support that distro are very helpful. It has an integrate script to fully install HA supervised version. If you can’t figure out how to build the image file they will usually post one for you. A great platform with a great bullseye distribution. The Odroid also gives you standard GPIO pins, which can be used to integrate hardwired security sensors from an existing alarm system. You can even use a cell phone connected to USB to provide Cellular backup communication.
Often I see the power draw of a Pi or similar board being stated as incomparable with a Intel x86 platform.
Well, i think, looking at my own setup, that when smart choices are made, this does not need to be a big difference.
I’m running HA on a SFF PC with Intel Celeron J1900 quad core and 4 GB RAM.
The PC + Zwave dongle + RfxTrx dongle + Sonoff 433 MHz hub + 3x MiLight hub is running on continuous 9W of power.
The processor runs at 7-9 % of its capacity.
So in my eyes, the computing power / electric power draw ratio is very satisfying and really worth a consideration. And, you can actually buy those everywhere
As stated, most of those videos afe talking about using older, used thin client PCs.
If you a want new Intel based unit it will be more than $50. In fairness, so was a full Pi setup by the time you added case, power supply, storage etc.
Pretty much any low price Intel Celeron mini PC is more than sufficient, pretty commonly available new for under $150, with countless options under $200. A quick Amazon search renders plenty of matches.
I’d avoid the units with eMMC storage, they may be fine, but can sometimes be tricky to get an alternate image installed and running.
Most (not guaranteed) units with an SSD should boot the haos image. Just make sure you have return options. Power consumption for those units should also be pretty good at around 10w or less.
odriod N2+, 4G RAM, 32G emmc, 3A power supply and case comes in at $139 from ameridroid. You also need to little sd adaptor to write the emmc so that’s a couple more $. You can get it cheaper if you buy directly from hard kernel, just takes longer to show up.
I have both running Proxmox with a few VMs each. One has an i7-8700 with 16GB RAM and the other has a i7-9700 with 32GB of RAM. Both have 1TB SSD. One has an additional SSD and the other has a dual port 10GBe FO NIC. They do run different things but the goal is to have HA on both with one being ready to takeover in case of a catastrophic failure of the other.
I often wonder what CPU characteristics matter for webRTC as it is the most intensive process on my HA OS based instance (in Proxmox VM). Open to any suggestions!
@JeeCee I can’t recall exactly, plus it likely varies with load, but I believe it was around 50 or 60W per system. The power supply powering each ones maxes out at 135W. These PCs have the K version of the i7 which is limited so they use less than a regular PC but also have lower performance.
Edit: I got them on ebay and I believe they were between $500 and $600 US each.
