Hi
I manage about a few vacation homes and I use honeywell thermostats and Wink for home automation tasks. I would like to use home assistant to monitor everything from one dash board. I have used the Raspberry pie but it is too unreliable. I would like to know what is the most reliable platform to install and run home assistant. Is there any 100% cloud based platform yet ? Reliability is most important to me, but reasonable cost.
The Pie isn’t the issue
its as robust as any computer is
the storage medium it uses is
SDcards are its downfall
avoid any platform that uses it as its storage
My Current setup is an Intel NUC with an SSD
running the full HomeAssistant and nothing else.
Which NUC are you using?
Can the pie use any other storage device besides SDcards?
Found out the Pi4 can boot off external SSD
Wonder if any one has tried this with Home Assistant
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/im-booting-my-raspberry-pi-4-usb-ssd
Of course. Using an external SSD is the recommended way to install HA on a Raspberry Pi if you want to avoid SD card issues.
Has anyone built one of these. Looks great. with the Pi4b , case and SSD it is about $225. Not too bad
A base line (Entry Level) Intel NUC wont break the bank
and if your looking at Reliability then you can’t go past it
plus you have better wifi, Larger Memory, plus in built Bluetooth if you get one with it
and faster processing than any Pi can do
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A Pi with an SSD and decent power supply is just as reliable as a NUC. In terms of performance, well, the CPU of my HA Pi is at around 3% on average. It depends on what you want to do with it obviously. But for the vast majority of users, a NUC is complete overkill when you only run HA on it.
The Pi has builtin Bluetooth too. And memory wise, 4GB is plenty for HA.
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You can ‘link’ multiple instances of HA together:
Go with either a RPi & SSD, HA Blue/Odroid or cheap NUC. You don’t need huge processing power until you start recording CCTV cameras with it.
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What do you think about this NUC
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I had good result with a pi3b+ running HA at my home and installing a Wink Hub at each rental unit to remotely control the locks, thermostats, lights and sensors.
So the rental unit hardware consisted of Internet access, the router supplied by the ISP and a Wink Hub.
It interfaced to Schlage Z-Wave entry door locks, Emerson thermostats, Zigbee type lights and sensors.
The thing I liked about this setup was if my pi ever went down (very rare), I could still access and control everything with my evil-China-made-ZTE-android-smart-phone.
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If you really want a cloud platform you could try with DigitalOcean. Deploy a debian server and upload the HA OS image to set it up.
I’m not really sure how successful this would be though. HA’s mantra is local control, not cloud. They heavily prioritize local-access in their integrations which isn’t really possible with a cloud solution. You’d have to rely only on integrations that also have a cloud offering. Or else you’d have to set up some kind of bridge to get your cloud HA talking to them (in that case, seems like you might as well just install HA locally).
But I doubt a fully cloud-based solution is even in their long-term roadmap given their constant focus on local access and control so if you want that you’d likely have to build it yourself. I have no idea how difficult it would be to get this working or what challenges you’d face trying this, just throwing it out there since you mentioned you wanted a cloud-based platform.
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