Yes, but depending on where its shipping to Aliexpress can be a very long wait with the current situations. Protectli is fairly local to me with product support for the hardware. Just another option for people. I got one before pandemic for pfsense build, went another way with it had it sitting around.
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I have a circa 2016 Mac Air with 8gb that’s never going to get used… has anyone used a Mac for HA? I also have a couple ZBox mini PCs with i3, 8gb that I could repurpose with a fat SSD. The Mac would be nice because it has a screen and good battery… the mini PCs are probably easier. THoughts?
The delay from China is almost always in U.S. Customs.
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To digress a little bit. I would not disagree completely 🤷, but working for a railroad that services the Port Newark elizabeth marine terminal area NJ/NY freight and passanger. There is alot of West coast ships now being diverted to East coast Ports to be hauled west via air, and rail. I’m confident customs is just a tiny bit of the bottle neck atm. Thus my notation of “current situations”.
It would be nice to have some affiliate links for users outside the US that want to support you while simultaneously upgrading or buying (much needed) stuff.
You can actually run HA (from the full HA OS to Docker containers, etc.) on anything back to a Raspberry Pi 1. Do note that the RPi 1 and Zero are no longer supported as of HA 7.0. You must install HA 6.6 for those.
You can get any release of HA OS from their GitHub Releases:
And if you want to jump right to 6.6:
Just expand the Assets at the bottom of each release box and download the version you need (although really, 7 is the best option for now… until 8 is released, of course!)
Honestly any user will be disillusioned by a pi1 or zero.
I can’t believe what you guys pay in electricity over there. I line in the ny Metro area and pay $0.30 per KW/h
$0.30?!?!? Only $0.11355 here in San Antonio. I will never complain about my electric bill ever again!!! LOL
edit: And we just had a 3.85% rate hike go into effect.
I run HA Supervised on top of Debian 11 on a 2012 Mac Mini. Exceptionally easy install with plenty of power and it is very stable. I have 2 2012 minis that run Linux and never have any problems out of them.
Terry
This looks promising: PCWorld: Framework takes on Raspberry Pi with standalone X86 mainboards.
At these prices you are way into Intel NUC territory which already has an HAOS image.
Add RAM and an SSD then flash HAOS. Done.
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Interesting discussion.
I am running a Pi 4 with 8 GB and I have no issues so far. Not even an sdcard failure (knock on wood). I tried an old SSD once but it failed after 3 weeks (after running for 3-4 years in my laptop).
I never thought of switching to e.g. an old laptop given that I have not noticed any sluggishness or similar problem (running supervised).
Advantage for me is low power consumption (ecologically interesting, not financially) and the low space it uses. Okay, it also costs only 50€ new, so that is a good argument also. By the way, a laptop that only uses 8 W is quite good. Mine is more like 15 W. And my Pi is less than 3 W. So factor 5.
Biggest plus: No fans → no noise.
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That pi is the top end of pi’s. Good luck with the SD card.
Also, due to the chip shortage and supply chain issues, you can’t find a pi 8gb or any pi4 for 50€ ($55 USD) anywhere. I don’t think that’s how much it cost when they were easy to get anyway.
Sorry, you are right. The 4 GB was 55€ and I opted for the 8 GB for 75 €.
But compared to Intel and other small SBCs, it is a bargain.
But still, an old notebook would have better performance and the huge advantage of built in keyboard, touchpad and screen. So no need for VNC etc.
Huge letdown in my opinion, is the extremely poor implementation of bluetooth & wifi on the Pi.
You cannot use a bluetooth keyboard and mouse at the same time without the keyboard repeating keys. Utterly useless 
ever heard of ssh? it is a standard computer management tool. look it up 
SD card failures are overstated if well managed. 100 or so Pis still on SDs, about half 4+ years old. We’ve had 1 SD card fail.
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I wonder how many database writes they are doing per day though?
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Ever heard of VNC? Graphical, full control rather than console…
I use both, but e.g. from my mobile, I prefer VNC.
Well, every user should, if they want to keep their data, define exclude and/or include. Otherwise writes and size might become an issue. But SSDs are definitely not ideal for high write cycles either. So if someone is really serious, buy a server drive.
Personally, I am thinking about simply moving my database to my NAS (running OpenWRT). That way the writes are on an old school HDD with automatic backup, leaving the sdcard to only handle the every day writes of Linux and HA (with logging set to fatal wherever possible). But I would prefer to actually have it on a cloud drive, but internet connection would need to be 100 % reliable, which is far from being true even in the year 2022 -.-