I am very new to the world of home automation so I have some very basic tinkering skills. I have recently flashed all my sonoff devices to Tasmota and wanted to give Home Assistant a go. I bought a news Raspberry Pi but on installing Hassbian - I realised that I could not really use my Pi for anything else…does Hassbian need an entire Pi? Is there any other way around this?
I wanted to use the Pi for OpenVPN and other smaller projects.
Hope you could assist me - I am sure that this has been asked before, if you could point me the right direction, I would be super grateful.
Hassbian is just raspbian with home assistant setup for you in a python virtual environment. You can quite literally do anything else you like that you can do on raspbian…
I have an RPI3b. Rapsbian is installed.
HA is on a venv. I have more than 100 automations running on it. Also too many components setup. I cant really count everything (a cool tool that can tell you this kinda info would be great!) but I can tell you I have HA for almost everything in my house.
Beyond that, I have installed Motioneye on the Raspbian and I am motion detecting through 2 IP cameras @ 640*480 and of course recording.
I cant really tell you how many things I have setup on my Rasbpian, but they are some sort of basic stuff I need for my home network.
All these things eat almost 40% of my CPU.
Without motioneye the CPU runs at 10%. So I think HA is super-extra-duper-light
Hassio pretty much locks you into only being able to put hassio (plus add-ons) onto your Pi and that’s all.
Hassbian, as already stated, is just a Raspbian install (Debian for RPi) with HA already pre-installed in a venv for you. You can do anything with a Hassbian install that you can do with any other RPi running Raspbian.
I’ve got a 64GB SD card in mine and I’m only at 9.4% of capacity. My HA system isn’t finished yet (I keep coming up with new things and not finishing old things), but I’ll probably run out of CPU/memory before I run out of storage space.
I recently unearthed an Arduino Uno from my box(es) of electronic bits and pieces. It’s got a Type B USB connector. I have no earthly idea what to do with it. Or which of the dozens of power supplies I have might operate it…
25 if you live in the US. There are places where a rPI3 plus SD card can cost up to 65 USD. And there are parts of the world where 65USD is a good chunk of a “normal” person monthly income.
I get that technology is reasonably expensive and all of that. But it’s a little bit short-sighted to call people cheap for trying to get the most out of their investment. Also not everyone is aware of hardware limitations, this is a forum full of people that do this for a hobby and not tech experts.
Yeah. I have 5 Pi’s - 3 original Pi 1B’s and 2 3B’s. Since I got my NUC, only 3 of them have a use now and only 2 are used 24/7. They are cheap as chips and using one for a dedicated purpose makes sense to me. I have 2 of the Pi1B’s - one runs an Apple Time Machine look alike and one runs FreePBX. One Pi3B controls my coffee maker…
I am running Debian with Hass.io using the generic linux install. I choose not to cripple the NUC running a cut down O/S. Gives me the best of both worlds. Hass.io and add-ons as well as full Linux access.
You can, but you probably won’t want to… The overall experience of home automation is very dependent on responsiveness. If your home automation system takes longer to respond than it would to get up and flip the switch yourself, what was the point of all that work? So if you’re just starting out small, you can put some other stuff on your Raspberry Pi. But I think that you’ll rapidly come to the point where everything that you want to do won’t fit anymore. Plus running all of those things all on one system can complicate your setup and make debugging much harder…
The challenge is measuring peak CPU as it’s likely you are hitting 100% often but just don’t see it in the standard metrics. This can have an impact on how responsive your HA is. In the past it also impacted zwave performance quite a bit but that might have been cleaned up.
You need to capture high resolution metrics to see this but note that collecting them also adds quite some load
