Hi, I’m following this guide for setting up Home Assistant on Raspberry Pi: Raspberry Pi - Home Assistant
It says under suggested hardware, that I’ll need a Raspberry Pi 4 or 5. I have a Raspberry Pi 3 model B+. Is it not possible to set up Home Assistant on this?
// Jonas
Not really. You MIGHT get it to work but minimum ram requirements have outgrown the Pi3.
For experiments mayyyybe… But if you plan to actually run you need more beef. Personally I wouldn’t start down a doomed path.
Thanks! I think I’ll get a new one then
Reuse that Pi3. I started off with a 3B+ 6 years ago for HA but had to retire it about 3 years ago due it lack of memmory. I now use that pi for pihole with unbound and run a VPN on it so I can access my HA when I’m away from home.
Yeah exactly, I saw that. That’s why i wanted to hear if it was not possible at all to make it work with the Raspberry Pi 3
Before you go down the RPI route consider a mini PC, bit more power consumption but more capable and if you buy a used Dell/HP ex business PC will probably cost you less overall.
If you have Zigbee and MQTT devices, you might want to consider running your Mosquitto broker and Zigbee2MQTT on that Pi 3 instead of loading your main machine up with that.
I’m not doing that right now but it’s definitely something I’m thinking about these days in order to not impact my Zigbee network when I’m rebooting the NAS than runs my Mosquitto Broker or the Pi 5 that runs Home Assistant.
Yes, this. It’s possible if you run a very minimal setup. Could be ok for a first try-before-buy. I started like that a few years ago. Memory was tight but it worked.
I do run zigbee and zwave this way on a 3b+
Even uses ser2net for the Plugwise usb beta integration so I can keep using my 30+ circles.
Only downside is startup. Zigbee2mqtt refuses to start if it’s unable to connect to mqtt broker.
Other way around is that the Plugwise integration really likes it when the dongle is connectable.
So eather way something has a hickup that delays full working ha.
Sometimes resulting in a reload of Plugwise or a reboot of the pi.
If you’re running on a Linux box, you can schedule your zigbee to mqtt to start after the mqtt broker is running.
Jonas is the one pushing his bicycle on the side of the aurobahn, as we whizz past in our heated cars. Yes, we’ll both get to our destination, eventually. With the price of RAM sky-rocketing, be grateful you are not walking barefoot. Look at the future for processor speed and memory requirements for whatever option you choose, and upgradeability.
I would not bother, unless you are just looking for a way to cause yourself frustration.
Like a couple of the other folks who have responded, I started out on a 3B+ almost 6 years ago. It was just able to handle my small setup back then. But I moved to a Mini PC within 6 months… after its second microSD card failure.
Hm, would be something to investigate. Zigbee2mqtt is running on a pi in docker compose container.
