Repurpose an old router to run Home Assistant

Installation
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With the chip shortest and inability to get Raspberry’s within an reasonable time frame AND price - I’m trying to figure out if there is an alternative approach.

I’ve got some old routers laying around, at the moment I’ve got an Asus RT-N12D1 that I used to use in my motorhome.

I don’t need the WiFi capability of the router as I can put it near my home router and hard connect.

I’m not adverse to finding a different router if more memory or RAM is needed. The N12D1 has 32Mb of memory/8Mb RAM.

I am by no means a tech whiz. I can stumble and trudge my way through things but for this project I am clueless about where to start. I have done things like set up a headless Raspberry Pi and implemented OctoPrint so I could drive my 3d printer wireless. And I’ve designed some controller boards and such. But this mountain is a pretty steep one for my skillset.

Hoping for someone more intelligent than I to help guide me.

Thanks!

2

I think this idea is not feasible because a router which is powerfull enough to run HA would be very hard to find. You would for example at least something with 1 GB of ram.
If you want to find a cheap alternative I would look into the direction of repurposing an old X86 based computer. (But they are more power hungry than a rpi)

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Thanks Roeland!

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I tried to go the old X86 route, but my PC’s were TOO old, would not support Virtual Machine.
I ended up going with an Odroid N2+ with 4 GIG. Works great!

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You didn’t need a virtual machine, you could install Linux and have a standard python virtualenv installation. Or a container which is also very lightweight.

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Is it possible - on any hardware - to install HA directly? I mean like install HA OS, without virutal machine, virtualenv, docker… so, say, take an old PC and install HA OS on it (without linux, windows…)?
What’s the fastest / best install - where HA runs best? VM? Docker? RPi?

7

Why not? Just flash HA OS on a drive stick it in some hardware and boot from it…
However, i think it at least needs to support UEFI

8

The issue with installing HA OS on sine random hardware is drivers.
HA OS runs on Alpine Linux and it can be a bit difficult to install extra drivers.
It is a lot was er to install Debian that support pretty much all hardware and then install HA on top of that.

2 Likes
9

if it has a 64bit processor and support UEFI, it can run HA OS. If not, installing Debian 11 and Supervised is the way to go.

3 Likes
10

Thanks for explanations. So, as always drivers are “critical point”. The reason i’m asking is that i wonder, if HA running directly would be any faster than, say, my current HA in synology VM…

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Virtualenv has very little overhead.
Docker has some more, but it is still pretty lightweight.

1 Like
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Thanks. The reason i’m in doubt is that i installed windows into synology’s VM (just for fun…) and it’s uselessly slow. Now, that could be because it’s running in VM or ( more probable, i guess) that CPU of my NAS is to slow for windows…

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Virtualizing windows does take a lot more cpu then linux,
also, on HA OS there is no graphical user interface (which i guess takes the most cpu when virtualized)

1 Like