Raspberry Pi Zero or 3B

[donna]

I am a newbie here, and I am just starting out with HA.

I just want to start tinkering with HA and don’t have any devices as of now, maybe run weather portal, and maybe scrape Gas prices.
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I am looking at the installation for Rpi, and I can’t see an image for Rpi Zero W:

Raspberry Pi

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Does that mean that Zero W is not supported anymore? or is there a different image for that?
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Or is the Pi Zero only good for a Room Assistant?

Presence detection with low cost BLE devices and Raspberry Pi/Zero W

Interesting topic, I’ve also been looking at this recently and I think I’ll use some ESP32 as “sensor”. They already include bluetooth and wifi, so with the right piece of code, they should be good to go without any soldering or other module. And they cost only 6$ with no need for SD card, more availability than pi zero w, no sd corruption and lower power consumption. I’ve order some ESP32 and can share my result once I got them if there is some interest (I plan to make them publish mqtt mess…

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For 3B+ there are 32 and 64 bit images;
Does that mean I need to know if I have a 32bit 3B+ or 64bit
or both images work with any 3B+?

[richieframe (Richie)]

If you are brave enough to attempt an install on a zero, you will need to install debian then a python virtual environment, then try to install HA and hope it does not crash due to low mem.

The recommended min RAM for HA is 2GB.

[donna]

Thank you for your note.
2GB RAM ?

Now understand why they use Odroid

[richieframe (Richie)]

My HA python process is using 350MB of memory by itself, my total OS load is 15.4GB, but 11GB of that is for a different database. Running Linux on half a gig is possible, but do not expect it to do much before it freaks out

[donna]

I guess I will need to get the Odroid 4GB

[sparkydave (🇦🇺 Dave)]

Or Rpi4.

Whichever hardware option you choose I would suggest using the 64Bit image as this opens up more options for add-ons later. Some add-ons are not compatible with the 32Bit image.