Raspberry Pi 5

It has been communicated that work for support is ongoing and aim to be done before Christmas or early next year

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I think the Pi5 is still too new and also waiting for a CM5 might be the better option as the FPC pcie might only support pcie2.0 whilst 3.0 is avail it may be noisy like it was on the 1st revisions of the Radxa Rock4 that changed from FPC due to problems.

I have a Pi 5 preordered as just a SBC geek and think Raspberry have been spooked by the rk3588(s) popularity as they have never released before stock is available before.

Standard Pre-orders

First batch
If you placed your order before 28/09/23 10:00 (UK Time), we estimate these pre-orders will start shipping at the end of October and early November

Second batch
If you placed your order between 28/09/23 10:00 and 28/09/23 20:00 (UK Time), we estimate these pre-orders will start shipping November/December

Third batch
If you placed your on/order after 28/09/23 20:00 (UK Time), we estimate these pre-orders will start shipping early 2024

If you got in quick and your lucky then maybe you will have one by the end of Oct but prob now after the Xmas batch your talking early 2024…

I have Rock5b & Opi5 (rk3588 & rk3588s) which have a Process-Voltage-Temperature Monitor (PVTM ) that allows them to offer a wider binning as it will auto adjust freq, but makes OC near impossible.
The Rpi5 supposedly will clock up to 3.0Ghz (OC) but still the VC-VII is no match for the Mali G610 and doesn’t have a NPU and the RK3588 when not running NVME idles as low as 1.8watt whilst stock the Pi5 is 2.8watt.
Rockchip really nailed the RK3588(s) SoC its likely better perf/watt with more displays much better GPU and generally a tad superior, but it doesn’t have the Raspberry ecosphere…

I also can’t help but wonder why the need for more power and higher cost.

Because people like me have touchscreens around the house that need to be responsive. And if you have 6x 4K CCTV cameras running a live stream then you need a device that can handle those streams simultaneously. Try even 6x 1080p cameras on your Pi3 and see what happens.

I have around 250 automations. Approaching 100 WiFi devices. Several Zwave and Zigbee devices.

Just because you haven’t pushed the limits of your home automation doesn’t mean there isn’t a market and an appetite for a Pi 5 with more performance. When you have home automation you want any user interface devices like touchpads to be extremely responsive. I preordered and can’t wait to use it. Lag when you want to check what’s going on or control devices around the house is the bane of existence.

PS. This device is amazing for the price.

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Fair enough. I shouldn’t have phrased it that way. Of course there are use cases where more power will help. Yours is a great example.

What I should have said was that not everyone takes that approach. My security cameras, entertainment systems, and other such don’t use HA. While there’s a good argument for standardizing/centralizing on one system for everything, there are reasons to go a different way, too. The “all eggs in one basket” argument can be made. As can the argument for picking the best solution for each function, rather than trying to shoehorn everything into one framework.

I guess what I’m saying is I hope HA continues to remain flexible enough to support different approaches. That would include the quick, easy and inexpensive entry-level home monitoring/automation system, without all the extras. It’s nice that HA can do so much more, but we shouldn’t be suggesting that new users have to start there.

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I too was wondering why so many were worried about the power consumption. I estimated a Pi would use about $6 a year. Looks like I was close.

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Hm… for such a big and demanding setup i wouldn’t think twice to buy a( perhaps used) NUC instead. OK, it might be more costly, but since you have so much devices in your house whole thing wasn’t cheap anyway.

The idle consumption for the Raspberry Pi 4 is/was quite high with ~3W - the same (or worse) is to expect with the Raspberry Pi 5 too. :man_shrugging:

Just for a dirty comparison: Devices based on Rock Chip RK3588 (octa-core) idling around 1.5 watt :point_down:

Raspberries with their SOCs using lithography from the last decade are not efficient at all - most used laptops or phones from the last decade should be more power efficient. :zap:

Also as a side note: The new RPi 5 would like a 5V5A (25W) PSU which is quite uncommon for now and most people having even a 100W USB-C power brick already might find out that it is not able to deliver more than 3A@5V (15W) :warning:

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Yes, there are many better or more power efficient options out there. Maybe even cheaper options. But, for most users of Home Assistant, the Pi is a mostly simple install/maintain option. Not everyone wants to bother with Docker and/or Pi OS.

I am a software engineer and technical enough to manage the extra Docker and Pi OS maintenance. But even I prefer to just have HAOS on a Pi.

The power efficiency of the device is very academic in my opinion. $6 a year for electricity is not going to be noticed and will have NO impact of the global environment. It is about simplicity and convenience.

Clearly the Pi 5 is way overkill for most Home Assistant users (even me). I currently have a slow Pi 3 1G and it is straining with all my many devices and “extreme” custom ESP Home sensors that spam events and verbose sensor data. I look forward to upgrading to the Pi 5 and paying my $6 a year for electricity.

Final thought:
I believe the Pi 5 will be a good thing for Home Assistant because it will help relieve the shortage and price pressure that we have seen lately. I believe the Pi 4 which is enough for most HA users will become more available and cheaper and that is good for Home Assistant.

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I have an Opi5 and it manages passive cooling of about 1.4 watt at the Usb-C but 2.3 watt at the plug with my 120watt PD charger.
Now we are all USB-C I wonder if chargers are ever going to get a energy rating as like mine the efficiency of some is pretty bad.
With a Raspberry Usb-C 3amp charger at the plug it lowers to 2.0 watt.

Hm… that’s not only for Pi. When i installed HA on my NUC all i did was flashed image to SSD (with etcher) and put it into NUC. Pretty much the same procedure goes for VM inside Synology. Ok, i guess a few clicks more…

There seems to be a standard for chargers, but not many have it and some that have it even fail to meet the standard.
I learned a lot about GaN chargers from the tests made on this YouTube channel.

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I have some some claim ‘Gold Standard’ but there seems to be no cert label or what that standard means.
There is no logo or sticker like there are with PC PSU’s

Don’t worry, I have a beefy server actually dealing with beefier stuff. The Pi 4 is doing just fine with low FPS on the cameras. I believe the Pi 5 will considerably improve (remains to be seen) and not use as much power. It has RISC video decoders that are more power efficient than running on Intel.

When you already know what you are doing, it is easy…

I have an RPI4 w/8 GIG of ram on an SSD with about 150 devices and over 300 automations - from time to time there are slight issues but normally there are no issues (with CPU usually ~10% (spinking once or twice a minute to 50%) and memory about 30% most of the time.

I have no video and wanted to include possibly 5-10 video feeds but have held back because I believe my hardware definately would collapse under that - and the only way to guarantee reliability is to have the hardware being able to handle at least 2x what you would want to throw at it. (The RPI4 certainly canot handle 2x what I am doing now anyway.) So, I don’t think an RPI5 is the way to go for my next step - could an RPI5 handle what I want to do?

Simply viewing video feeds from HA does not need much hardware. If you want the HA hardware to actually process the video and or allow viewing the history, it will need some plug-in to HA or software on the Pi OS (not HAOS). That will need much more hardware power. Pi 5 might to enough depending on your needs. I tried something on my Pi 3 with 1G memory - It was not acceptable with 4 IP cameras.

I would suggest researching the software options and see what those products are capable of doing. Such software should ideally recommend minimum hardware requirements. Hopefully you could get an idea of what hardware you would need.

I forget what add-ons there are but motionEye might be a starting point to investigate. Do some Google searches to find more ideas. Also look in the HA addon store (e.g. motionEye).

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Lucky you, my power costs are tiered, I pay roughly $0.25 per unit on the lowest, $0.5 on the middle and $0.6 on the higher tier, we’re not a heavy user, but until I piled a load of solar panels and batteries on our patio, we were almost always halfway through tier 2. Still $10 a year to run a Pi4 24x7 is the sort of cost you don’t worry about, eat an extra day of salad instead of pie and chips and the cost is covered. For me the Pi was chosen because, I knew if I went down the route of small PC, I’d end up installing Windows, because for me it’s easier and then it would cost me more, whereas the Pi I’m pretty well stuck with Linux and more pain, but negligible power costs.

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Is that not just the same as the Pi How to Install Windows 11 on a Raspberry Pi 4 | Tom's Hardware and has no effect but choice?

Guys, i think that you’re a bit overreacting about consumption… there’s a cost for everything, and running a smart house is no exception. No pain, no gain they say…
You’re talking about (decimals of) watts, some 5-10$ saving per year, but on the other hand many of you go to a beer after work, or a cup of coffee… and noone looks dollars-euros here :slight_smile:

I have Synology NAS with full-load consumption around 30+W, then i have three routers (one main and two AP’s), each one consumes 10-20W. Then there’s a bunch of wifi modules… further on: i have 9 cameras plus NVR… I don’t look for power consumption here, since what i need is what i have.

As i say: there’s a price to pay for automating a house… you can’t drive a ferrarri and have consumption of 3-4L per 100km…but of course you can always select some small, slow diesel (but if you’re happy, it’s quite ok…) :rofl:

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It really is a bit strange worrying about about a few watts over a year, yet running hundreds of sensors ,switches, cameras etc. Probably a lot of which are run on coin batteries which will almost certainly cost more to run than a pi5. If you really want to save electric don’t have a smart home :slight_smile:

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