Faster ARM based board: Rock64 vs Odroid XU4

Hardware
1

I am currently running Home Assistant as a docker on a Raspberry Pi3. Since I am also running other services (Grafana, InfluxDB, Homebridge, …) as docker containers, I am looking for a hardware upgrade. I read a lot about people upgrading to an Intel NUC, but I would like to keep power consumption as low as possible.

Therefore, I would like to stay with the ARM architecture and upgrade to a faster ARM based board. My priorities for a new boards are CPU, RAM and power consumption. SATA is not that important, but I would appreciate a 1GBit/s Ethernet interface.

So far it seems that either the Odroid XU4 or the Rock64 board are meeting my priorities. But I can`t really decide which one of these boards would fit better. I also considered the ASUS Tinkerboard, but software support seems to be lacking behind the other two.

XU4:

  • Faster CPU

Rock64

  • 4GB RAM

I wonder what ARM based hardware other users are using to run Home Assistant on? Maybe I missed another serious alternative?

2

I decided just to buy a second pi, and use the first one dedicated for HA (without docker) and the second for other stuff (including appdaemon, pihole, mosquitto, etc).

But for me at least I think the future is a NUC.

3

I’m using an ASRock Beebox running Ubuntu but that’s closer to a NUC …

4

It seems a nice device. Are you using it only for Home Automation or also other tasks? (ASRock calls it explicitly a NUC)

5

Do you have some more information on the power consumption?

6

There are several models, I picked the low end one because it had passive cooling and presumably therefore lower power requirements, I also like that you can fit an SSD which is a big boost over the PIs memory card - I started on a PI too.

I use mine for running HASS, AppDaemon, and also I do development of AD on that box which means running multiple AD instances.

So far it has been more than capable of handling all of that.

7

I am reconsidering the ASUS Tinker Board, since it also has Bluetooth, which saves me an additional dongle. After doing some research, it seems that the software support also increased. The new S version also has eMMC, but is not available yet in Germany.

8

FWIW I’m running mosquitto, nodered, hass, appdaemon on an XU4 and am not running into memory issues yet. I’ve liked the ODroids over the years in that the HW has been solid and they do update the OS builds. The transition from Linux v3 kernels to v4 took longer than I would have liked but they did eventually get there. The emmc support is also great, I run with a 32GB emmc plus a 128GB sdcard for large media files (e.g. video camera uploads).

9

I’m thinking about the LattePanda Delta with an Celeron N4100 CPU. It’s like 10x the Pi3 performance and will run everything as it is quad-core 64-bit x86 @ ~5W max.
$100 for the XU4 2GB RAM excluding eMMC vs. LattePanda Delta with 4G RAM, 32GB eMMC for 149$. Seems like an easy choice…

10

Thanks for all the suggestions. I recently bought a Tinkerboard from ASUS. Home Assistant starts slightly faster and the two GB of RAM give me some extra head room for running a bunch of docker container.

I can recommend it as a faster PI3 replacement, especially if you can use the extra RAM. And it has Gigabit Ethernet.

11

I am looking in to a replacement of my pi. The odroid xu4 looks very promising. Does someone knows if the gpio connectors works the same way as with the pi and works with home assistant? I currently use the gpio on the raspberry with HASSbian in a virtual environment but want to use it with a odroid perhaps