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!

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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?

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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

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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.

3 Likes
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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.

4 Likes
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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
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You need to allocate more resources to the Guest OS (the virtual machine). That will improve it’s performance. BUT, consider disabling 50% of all things Windows - services, start-up, uninstall apps. etc.
You can download ISO files with Windows 10 Lite and cut down editions which have been crippled to run the essentials.
The other essential thing to do is disable all themes and 3D effects. More bells and whistles = more RAM and swap consumed.

MORE importantly, can we use ASUS Routers (Gnuton / Merlin / AsusWRT firmware) and run Home Assistant (or similar) on them?
I don’t want to have to purchase a $300 N2 or Raspberry PI or a PC and have it running 24x7. Surely something else exists to utilise “under-utilised” hardware?

Cheers!

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Ufff…you’re answering to a 3 years old thread…
But, to explain: that windows install was just for fun. I did allocate all 4 cores and enough memory (i have 20GB total on my syno). I didn’t really plan to use it in any way. As said above, CPU is just not fast enough, and also running VM’s isn’t exactly high priority for synology.

I don’t know how could you ever run HA on asus router… i guess it’s mission impossible. For start CPU isn’t nearly enough powerful for such thing, you generally have 512MB (or even less) of RAM…

You don’t need 300$ for pc, get a used mini PC, almost any will do. I bought old Intel nuc skull canyon with i7 cpu, 32G of ram and 1TB SSD for just over 200€. Yeah, it’s old, but still huuugely overpowered (hanging at 2-5% of CPU use). But it proves it’s power when doing intensive stuff, like HA restart, esphome compile etc… these things go really fast. Since i have plenty of memory i installed proxmox so i can use nuc for other things, too.

Any (used) N100 or similar will do. About ram: 8 gigs will be more than plenty even when you’ll have tons of stuff on HA, and with 128G SSD you’ll be over the moon, even 64GB will do. I have around 50Gb occupied, but bear in mind that i have constantly 10 daily backup copies on same SSD, so without them numbers would be way lower.

Also forget Pi - too expensive for it’s power.

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