My usage- I don’t run many automations. A few for outside lights. Probably a dozen or so esp home sensors for crawl space sensors and temp/humidity sensors controlling my greenhouses.
I’ve been thinking about upgrading from my yellow that I’m currently using to a barebones nuc. Possibly this one. Mostly because updates tend to be slow. Updating the OS isn’t bad. Maybe 3 minutes or so. Updates for the esphome devices can take 8 or 10 minutes each (so more than an hour total). I’m hoping a faster cpu might help with this.
Would the upgrade be a good idea or just a waste of money? I’ve seen a few comments that some nucs are better with HA than others. Would welcome other hardware recommendations as well as upgrade advice in general.
From what you’re describing, upgrading honestly sounds like a waste of money, and probably even electricity.
For ESPHome compiles, you can always do that on another machine (back when I was using a Pi 3, it couldn’t even compile ESPHome projects so I just used my main computer).
As a side note, why are you typically updating your ESPHome devices? Outside of actively working on a project, I only wholesale update mine once or twice a year, unless there’s some new feature I want/need on a device. Most of the time, you’re going to end up with the exact same firmware getting written to the device after an update (unless something was updated that actually affects your device).
Wasn’t aware this was possible. Can you link some documentation? I see I can install esphome with brew install esphome on my mac but not sure how the ota update is handled.
I guess because it’s there.
Honestly I hadn’t really considered the necessity of the updates.
The updates are not always a good thing.
The storage in an ESP device is the same as used in a SDCard, so you have a limited number of write operations on them. You will probably not hit the general limit for writes, but each write operation has a chance to trash the storage for good and once that happens, then you can typically not just replace the storage, but have to get a new device.
Yeah but it’s not working for me tonight. I haven’t found anything regarding how to link a second instance of esphome to my HA yellow. Really doesn’t matter though if I’m not updating the devices anyway. Thanks for your time though.
You don’t link them, you just do all your compiling on another device. You don’t even really NEED the add-on in that case, although I did just to help organize things.
Yeah, in your case I’d personally just live with the slower compile times but only do it when needed.
Waste of money depends on perspective. I am running Home Assistant on an Intel NUC i5 and it leaves the Raspberry Pi in the dust. I have dozens of integrations, more than 50 ESPHome devices and Node Red add-on.
This is the Esphome Dashboard running in terminal on my Mac. The only problem is that many of the esp devices are missing. Will they eventually be discovered?
Moving from a Pi4 to a old NUC has made my Home Assistant instance much more stable and significantly more pleasant to use. I made the move when my setup was robust but the increased stability and speed has led to dramatic increases in the scope of my configuration. I am not certain I would have invested the time and energy need to make these changes with a Pi based setup. So, while there is a fair chance that the Pi may be sufficient for your current needs, there is some possibility that migrating will enhance your experience.
I agree that a NUC is the natural next step, but no need to take it now, if it is only for making the ESPHome compiling faster, when the ESPHome updating should actually be minimized to when only usable features become available.
I have this Lovelace card setup.
You will have to correct the update lines to fit your devices and then just copy the first one down to the 2 next ones.
It provide three buttons. One for updating all the ESPHome devices, one for hiding/skipping the current update warning and one for showing/clearing the skipped update warnings again.
RasPi to a NUC is quite a leap. HA runs happily on RasPi, so doesn’t really need extra CPU power unless you are using several add-ons which are compute-intensive - but it is nice
I recommend considering a middle approach … to purchase a used mini- or micro- business PC … there are plenty on ebay because businesses regularly upgrade all their PCs for tax purpose. Not the latest processor (unlike a NUC) (but lots more “grunt” than a RasPi), easy to upgrade if required, and a fraction of the cost.
I personally upgraded to a Dell Optiplex 7050 micro (7th gen i5 CPU, 8GB RAM, 2.5" HDD and M.2 PCIe slot, with win11 installed) for AU$160. It is low power (though admittedly a NUC may be even lower) which is great for a machine running 24/7 as a server. I installed Proxmox, and HAOS in a virtual machine, with capability to add other Virtual machines if required.
Yes, for day to day use the Pi is generally capable. However my instance would get bogged down with database searches (including history and the logbook), updates, video display, and various other tasks. The NUC I configured is an ancient 5th or 6th gen i3 and it absolutely sails through any task. I think you can get one of these for roughly the same price as a new Pi right now.
I think HA code has been refined considerably since my upgrade experience and I suspect it may run much more fluidly on a Pi now than it did at that time. I would not go back, however, and am instead planning to upgrade the NUC to see if I can get even more cumbersome integrations like LocalAI running on the same machine to try to take advantage of the work some have described regarding locally hosted voice assistants.
