Is a Surface Pro 4 suitable?

Installation
1

Hi all,
I’m beginning my Home Assistant journey and was wondering if an old Surface Pro 4 is suitable for running HA?
My usage will be pretty simple, mostly temp sensors around the, solar monitoring, and some smart switches. I already have the temps and solar in a Grafana dashboard so interested to see how HA compares.

i5-6300U, 8GB, 256GB
It can run Docker. I’m concerned about memory as usage is already around 4GB when idle.
Should I stick with this or ebay it and buy something else?
Thanks
Alan

1 Like
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Docker is the least of the concerns.

The SP4 is plenty capable machine. If you run Windows… Hardware support may be an issue. You first need to determine if Debian can even install on a Surface Pro 4 (because HAOS is based on Debian - - the Debian On project doesn’t list any surface except the book and it lists the network adapters as unsupported. That doesn’t give me a lot of hope because the surface lines generally all use the same guts.

You may also have issues with the battery if you leave it on charge 100%

3

Why not wipe it and install HAOS? I would imagine (though could be wrong) that it should be possible using the ‘generic x86’ install method.

4

Driver support on Surface may be difficult.

Especially if it’s the NIC driver… If Debian doesn’t support the NIC I doubt HAOS will either. We won’t know unless someone tries.

Id do it but my pro 4 is sitting on top of my Pro3 with a busted screen.

It is a ‘generic x86’ but there’s a lot of ‘enhancements’ going on in the hardware that requires nonstandard drivers.

5

Fair enough. The OP is probably better off using the Surface Pro as a dashboard (especially since it’s touch screen) and getting a NUC or similar.

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6

That’s what I would do. (and I worked for msft for 13 years…) it makes a beautiful dashboard device. (if you can sort the power.)

7

Thanks guys,
My SurfacePro has a bad screen, touch only works on half of it and when it gets hot the screen starts bluring. Thats why I was thinking of using it as a server.
I might give HAOS a go before buying something else as I’ve nothing to loose.

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It’s an interesting project and why I’d be interested to see if it even installs.

Your trouble spots will be

UEFI- Secure Boot wants signed code in the bootloader You’ll have to disable tha most likely. (remember this thing was designed to run win pro with bitlocker and as such UEFI wants an os that has been signed by a known publisher by default)

Watch the drivers. Especially the NIC.
Power… There’s a LOT of power management voodoo in all of the surface devices that may need to be disabled if it works at all
Heat… The SP4, 5, 6 all do a great job moving heat… When the fans work properly. I’m unsure how debian/HAOS will handle the fans. I THINK the fans at least are standard acpi so those should work. Worst case they’ll be always on.
Battery - I’ve personally killed 4 surface batteries leaving them always plugged in on my desk. YMMV

9

I’m interested to see what you end up doing. I’ve spent a few weeks now building a dashboard in HA with the intention of using my surface pro 5 as a central home information/control panel.

Because my dash will have a cctv camera feed and all sorts of other bits, its fairly resource intensive compared with a basic dashboard, but the surface handles it with ease thankfully. My model is the i5 with 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD.

I’m running windows 10 with as much disabled as possible in terms of windows services and background processes. Update turned off as it seemed to cause the surface to get quite hot while searching for and pulling down updates. Sleep, screensaver, power saving settings all turned off.

I’m running the hass.agent on there which gives me all my sensors in HA, such as processor use, battery charge level, RAM use, etc via MQTT. I can also control the surface by remotely turning the screen off, or dimming it.

Running MS Edge in kiosk mode which launche at startup in full screen, and I’m using browser mod to disable the sidebar and header, so i see my full dash only, and it can’t be minimised in error, or new tabs opened by swiping etc. Seems to work well.

To protect the battery, I have a smart plug controlling the charge level via automation, so it keeps the battery between 50 and 75%, rather than letting it remain on full charge, or doing full cycles.

Once I finish my dashboard design, i just need to work out how to mount the tablet on the wall and drill through the wall for the charging lead to keep that hidden.

Hopefully that might give you some ideas for your surface :+1:

10

Quick update for you…
I tried installing HAOS from a USB stick. It did boot up and seemed to run fine while connected via ethernet to my router. I was able to add a smart plug and control that ok.
Then after a reboot it decided not to reconnect to the router so nothing worked. Several reboots and still no network.
I think I am just going to ebay the SP and buy something else as the screen is bad anyway.
Thanks for all the advice.

11

Hola!
Estoy pasando al igual que tú por esa situación y quiero saber si ya la solucionaste.
Cual adaptador compraste?

12

Hi, I have a Surface Pro 2nd Gen running Home Assistant OS Flawlessly for the past 2 years.

All drivers including wifi, touchscreen, bluetooth are working fine. The processor and memory is more than enough. I plugged a USB3 powered hub and use a generic ethernet adapter + a Sonoff Zigbee Dongle.

Maybe my experience can help, any questions just @me

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so essentially you are running the tablet as the server. what do you use the touchscreen for?