Hi.
I’m looking for Raspberry Pi 4 Model B with 4GB RAM to install HA.
Anyway prices are very high and availability is very scarce (at least in Italy).
Is there anyone that can suggest me a clone of Raspberry that works without issue?
Any idea?
Thanks in advance.
Hi Cosimo, also have a look at Odroid (used for the HA blue) but another interesting option is to look for a second hand thin client.
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I’ll be honest, pick up a cheap, used micro PC instead. e.g. Dell Optiplex 3060 Micro i5 8500T 256GB, 8GB RAM, With Power Cable | eBay
I use a Dell Optiplex 3060 i5-8500T which I bought from eBay for just over £100. It’s many, many times quicker than the RPi4 it replaced and almost as easy to install, running HAOS. The only slightly fiddly bit is imaging it (you need to have a USB NVMe adapter), but apart from this the setup process is identical to an RPi, for only slightly more money and massively more performance.
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Thank you for your honesty… 
Also an interesting option though and with such a beefy system I would think about using some virtualization platform and install HA on top of it, which gives you more options/flexibility.
Agreed, although it’s a little more nuanced than this. HAOS is built around docker (and, indeed, the preferred standalone install of HA is also Docker-based), so you’d need to either be running docker in a VM (which is not ideal for performance), or stand up your own docker install to install either HA on its own, or a more complicated “supervised” install. It also gets a bit fiddly when you have specific, passthrough hardware devices (e.g. zigbee coordinators, Coral TPUs etc.)
Personally speaking, I’ve got enough “heavy” stuff on mine that I was happy to dedicate a box to it, so after a few tests, decided to stick with HAOS on bare metal for simplicity and remaining closest to the mainstream releases, but many others run their own dockers without any issues at all (apart from a bit more admin overhead!) I’ve also got a dedicated proxmox box for deploying VMs / containers anyway, so have the best of both worlds I think.
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I don’t think proxmox + haos is really resource intensive.
In Italy you have Wallapop. I bought my latest one via that platform. Many second hand selling RPI4s, just pay attention to the memory indeed.
HA isn’t, but if you’re using something like Frigate as an add-on then it can be. Also, this can depend very heavily on hardware-exposed video decoding and USB / PCI passthrough to a TPU, where latency can really impact the performance. But I would agree that for a stock, normal HA install, you could run it just fine as a complete HAOS-in-a-VM install without any issue.
You are right that when you want to use something like Frigate, you need more oomph then what a RPi can deliver.
It all comes down to the use-case, preference and budget.
You can get second hand beefier systems for the price of a RPi and I would also make that decision, again.
On the other hand, there are a lot of oversized systems just wasting energy because of not being used for their potential.
I have a system with a i5-6500 CPU, 32Mb or RAM and run 1 VM and 10 LXC’s on it, nothing that is CPU demanding.
Since the OP already uses a RPi he seems to know what the potential is.
For a friend I have installed HAOS on a HP T630 thin client, bought second hand which is a very good alternative to a RPi.
FYI: using some kind of adapter to install HAOS is obsolete.
With a live OS you can get there too.
All fair, but as right now it’s very hard to get hold of an RPi, and it’s definitely not worth overpaying to get one. The various Intel-based lightweight computing options only use a bit more power than an RPi - something like 10-15w for my own 3060 and a bit less for the n5105 parked next to it doing dedicated network duties.
Loads of good options out there, any of which would run rings around the RPi in performance and while on day 1 might be overkill for HA, my experience is that you’ll soon want to do more and more with it 
Is this correct? I could certainly see no option when I tried HAOS from a USB source - it just booted into a normal (if quite sluggish) HAOS installation.
A quick check of the documentation says:
HAOS has no integrated installer that writes the image automatically, you must write it manually using e.g. Etcher.
I guess if you wanted you could flash a different live distro to USB, boot this, and then flash to the SSD from there, but that’s a bit of a faff and for me it was just quicker to pop the drive out and flash it in one go.
That’s the way I was referring to: live distro on a USB drive.
Even though taking the drive out is the obvious way for you; it might not be so for other people + you have to buy some extra HW for this, maybe, one-time only.
TBH, this is an area where HAOS falls short and neither of these options are actually very nice. Explaining to someone why they need to download and flash one OS to flash another, completely different one is hardly user friendly.
A better solution would be if you were able to flash HAOS to USB and, at first boot (from USB) it offers to either run live from USB, or permanently install to a different drive with a single click (after all, the default HAOS doesn’t offer a plethora of storage installation options anyway!)
Best of both worlds and much easier for a beginner to understand. Perhaps this is already on the backlog somewhere…
MY Home Assistant is running solo on an Intel NUC, i3. You can find used ones for around $100 on eBay. I also have Frigate running with six cameras around the house. I have also been experimenting with a Celeron processor in the BMAX computer. I think it’s around $125 (new).
Basically, if it will run Linux, it will run HAOS.
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I highly doubt, that there are a lot of use cases for what you propose, sorry. The available options are more or less exactly tailored to the needs of the majority of the people. How’s that you say? 
- Pi users:
- if you’re a new user, either to Pi or HA, you will likely use the “standard option” to burn the image to an SD card, as it is as well proposed by the Pi foundation (and explained in depth on their site).
- if you’re an experienced user with Pi or HA, you might already be thinking about expanding your system, eg. with a SSD. That would also mean, you’d already need an adapter to use the SSD over USB in the Pi. This way you’d also have that adapter to flash the image onto the SSD. And how things work here, is explained in detail on the Pi foundation site, a little technical knowledge is assumed for this type of user, as there still are some changes to make to the Pi, that are needed to run from a SSD (=> not HA specific)
- PC users (this targets all these nice mini-PCs or old laptops or …):
- If you get a seperate PC for this use case, one can assume, that you at least be able to manage this device, so I count that as “basic technical knwoledge”. To this “basic technical knowledge” I count being able to change a drive (SSD, Nvme).
- Most users here will use some kind of virtualization, if they run HA on this kind of PC. That means on the other hand, they will just use the image in their VMs, and so they don’t need to flash that image anywhere, they just use it in the VM.
If you take a look at the statistics, the most used installation method is in a VM (over one third). Nearly the same amount of people use a Pi4 for their installation. All together we have good and working installation methods for over 80% of the installations (Pi4,3 and VM). I honestly don’t see the need for another installation method, that needs to be supported, when over 80% of the users seem to be good with their installation. 
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The only thing running on my Home Assistant NUC is HAOS. No VM or other virtualization to learn. Installing Home Assistant is really complicated:
- Flash the Home Assistant X86 image on the boot device.
- Reboot…
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Just to note, I wasn’t answering your post.
And yes, I’m totally with you, I can’t see any need for another installation method, especially not if another OS (whatever that would be) needs to be involved. I’d even say, if one is not able to do this task (which isn’t a problem at all), one shouldn’t work with such systems. Ask a friend or somebody who does “computer” for a living. It might cost you some money, but it is what it is. Get educated or pay, that’s the deal here.
I can see, that some people then won’t get HA at all, but honestly, if you don’t have the knowledge to follow tutorials step by step, you are better off with a proprietary system like HUE, where you don’t have the need to do all this. Which brings my back to “Get educated or pay, that’s the deal here.” 
I don’t know about other virtualization platforms: if you have multiple services on your network, scattered over different systems and you have something in the likes of a NUC, it’s can be interesting to go for virtualization.
Since I have discovered Proxmox, adding a container, a VM has never been so easy.
You get ZFS, snapshots, easy ways to backup and offload them - this has saved me multiple times, also with HA.
But hey, I’m not a salesman for this: just very enthusiastic about it and I guess almost everyone is who has discovered this and the benefit of virtualization.
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