Hi there,
I live near the sea with very high humidity (nearly always above 80%, often 90%), salt spray and temperatures around C°28-30 degrees. Electronics haven’t really enjoyed the beach life. It killed two second-hand desktop PCs that ran HA and Blue Iris (a HP G2 800 mini tower likely by salty condensation on the processor and HP G4 400 not sure what did it).
What would be the best HA/Frigate hardware for these conditions?
Options that I’m thinking of are :
- A mini-pc like Intel NUC 11 with a Coral and virtual machine for HA
- Two Raspberry 4 (one for HA another for CCTV) with a Coral but not sure it’ll be enough for Frigate
- A second-hand PC but protect it better and hope for the best.
I could put this in a box with some silica gel (I think dry cabinets need heating which wouldn’t be good). I’m wondering if there’s a better way. We are running on off-grid solar so ideally low-consumption.
What do you think?
More about my setup: on the PC I had home assistant and Blue Iris with 8 CCTV cameras (I’m thinking of switching to Frigate with a Coral). I’ve also got 3-4 ESP32 for water flow measurement (waterproof boxes outside), a raspberry 3 with OpenSprinkler for irrigation control and a of raspberry with Hifiberry to make my speakers smart. I also had a Tempest weatherflow station but it only survived 3 months.
The raspberries have been really robust to this environment (they are a bit rusty but keep going). Victron solar and the Hikvision cameras outdoors have been fine too (with waterproof boxes for the connections). The case of my Macbook Pro makes crunching sounds but so far so good.
Thanks for your advice!
John