Migration from Pi3 to Pi4 (Argon One Case)

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1

I noticed that with my Victron Venus MQTT integration (~50+ messages/sec) as well as more complex dashboards and… and… and… the old Pi3B with passive cooling was struggling a little.

So I sprung for an upgrade to a Pi4 in an ArgonOne case… My observations are this:

  1. The migration functionality by restoring snapshots was a breeze. Just needed to fidget with my static IP configurations a little to get the new device to replace my old and demote the old Pi3B to a “dev environment”
  2. The ArgonOne case is wonderful. In winter the house is at about 16 degrees and once the fan control is set up, even under a hammering the temperature is < 40 with the fan off. Turning the fan on at max only drops the temperature by 4 degrees, but lets see how that works out in Summer. Setting the fan control up was tedious given that the Pi4 is a bit different than the standard I2C guide see here
  3. The shocker though - I didn’t notice any WIFI degradation at all since I run the system wired. However, Bluetooth and BLE connectivity was radically reduced by the signal degradation as a result of the enclosed metal case (I assume this is not due to a weaker radio in the Pi4). So sadly I will have to replace my solitary MiFlora sensor with an ESP based one or get a Bluetooth dongle of some sort. What used to be a fairly workable integration at 5-6m range is now non-responsive unless the device is <1M away from the Pi4.

Overall I can recommend the ArgonOne + Pi4 but just watch out for that bluetooth and wifi signal attenuation.

2

I had the same Bluetooth issues when I put my Pi4 into a Flirc case and started running it on SSD via USB3. Totally passive and no fans but works really well. In the end I used my old Pi3B+ (Running HA and used for Zigbee and AdGuard) to pick up the Bluetooth devices that I used to on the Pi4 and to pass them back to the Pi4 using MQTT and NodeRed.

3

Indeed - am contemplating similar, but I do love this case though. Depending on how my experiments with Milight and Zigbee controllers turn out I may well end up adding an external box underneath to house the different wireless setups… if so I may just ditch the current case and mount the pi in a bigger enclosure or alternately run a seperate pi as a wireless gateway of sorts and communicate with that across MQTT. Options, options :slight_smile: