I am in the process of preparing my house for home automation.
Wishing to integrate a certain number of elements (nothing incredible, probably what everyone wants to do here) :
heating (heat pump and thermostatic head + temperature sensor)
rolling shutters and adjustable solar break
garage door and gate
mailbox
management of openings (window, door)
the lights
CCTV
and more sensors or connected plugs and devices
Do you think that Raspberry pi devices are the most suitable hardware today from a sustainability perspective?
Because I would like to avoid having to make a hardware improvement in the next 2-5 years ideally.
My advise: buy a N100 based mini PC. You can find them on Ali with 16Gb ram and a 512 Gb SSD for about ā¬150. If you buy a Pi 5 8Gb, a case, power supply and SSD, you want be far off. And the N100 hardly uses more power then the Pi, while being more capable.
You will be fine with a rpi5, but depending on how many cameras you add you could easily run into performance issues.
I would as suggested go with some kind of mini PC. You could look at second hand thin clients as they tend to be good value, plenty of storage, a coral tpu (for camera use).
HA itself does not need a lot power, but add camera motion detection and soon realise you need power, add storing video and maybe music and you need a lot of drive space.
As Francis suggested, get a used intel nuc or similar. Way more power, similar priced. Rpiās arenāt so cheap anymore, especially if you buy one with a bit more ram - 4GB is recommended for HA, SSD is also highly recommended for long-term stability and run.
+100 to the NUC. Skip the Pi. Way better performance and flexibility for similar cost
I ran a Pi4b8G for a year and a half, switched the install to an N100 (which was literally half the cost of a pi at the time, itās normalized a bit since then) and have not looked backā¦
I run HAOS on bare metal and it screams but thereās plenty of ābeefā if yih wanted to run Proxmox on it then run HAOS in there and yous still have plenty of headroom.
Go SSD not SD (SDs are just not durable for the kind of disk access HA uses)
Some tips are already given do not forget if you buy a Pi you also need to buy the rest it might add up. if you buy a 2nd hand NUC it will be complete for most likely cost less, take a high model because they can contain a SSD, there is one downside to a NUC in general and that is cleaning them, access to SSD and memory is no problem, but further under the hood might be a pain in the ass. Do not go for the latest model, myself installed everything on a NUC7i5BNH. I definitely do not suggest this is the best or even a good option, it was just one available for a good price. In this website you can see details look for:
little TDP because you are running 24/7
options for Internal Drive Form Factor (M.2 and 2.5" Drive)
ignore graphics because you are running headless
For your āCCTVā (so no COAX) I recommend one addition and that is a Google Coral M2-card.
Well, i have skull canyon i7 which can get hot and noisy, but running
HA is a no-load for it (1-2%, only when i compile esphome etc it gets higher), it runs cold, so fan is at very low speed,consequently very little of dust comes inside, so i think that cleaning wonāt be necesarry very often, also a good blow with air will be enough.
I get a nuc for my work because of the good compromise between space, silence and performance so I will follow your advice and try to find one at good price.
Maybe on a China website.
You donāt need that sort of power, but if you have the cash it be very future proof.
I have a cheap Beelink mini s that I use for certain stuff, testing and alike. It has been faultless for the 2 years I have had it. So I guess Beelink will be OK.
There is a question mark next to this specification in the link provided. It can explain much better than myself that it is how much power will be on average required to run the system, will it draw so much in a headless HAOS situation? Not likely mine is roundish 9 watt (I believe),
As @Protoncek indicated you have much room to install other things; for your light Zigbee is an option and you might want to use Zibee2MQTT (or ZHA), for my two cameras (āCCTVā) I am using Frigate, For music I had initially LMS (Logitech Media Sever) recently I sniffed on Music Assistant. For home brew IoT-devices using mainly esphome. All run in their own Docker container. However Docker can be cumbersome which I found sometimes out the hard way. Because the important stuff is likely also available inside HAOS you might better stick to this.
Cannot say anything about your model but the TDP=6w of a N100 (advice of @francisp0) looks promising. With 24/7 runtime each single Watt difference is still roundish 9 kWh on a yearly basis.
Apart from any device you can start with some minor tweaking in the EUFI/BIOS-settings (on boot F2 or something else )
