Currently investigating using Home Assistant as a measurement system for heat-pumps in an educational/school context. The plan is to present a couple of temperature, pressures and power consumption on dashboards. A RPi 5 (or 4) will be hosting the system, mounted on a DIN-rail.
The student will use their laptops to connect to WiFi and the complete the lab.
A couple of years ago I built a similar system using custom software running on Raspbian OS in tools no longer available so I thought of using HA.
A concern I have is how well HA will recover from being repeatedly abruptly shut-down.
Anyone have any experience with this? And yes - I know that this is not best practise, but the equipment will be handled like this.
My experience is powering off Home Assistant without a proper shutdown leads to serious problems. That is why I have my system on a UPS and can shutdown Home Assistant if the UPS power reaches 5%
Yeah, I get that. Since I really don’t need any historical data, I’m toying with the idea of simply deleting HA’s database file at boot to get a fresh start. I guess that may solve a lot of issues.
I always have a backup SD card (actually 3) with a mirror image of my working system. Recovering from a crash is as simple as swapping cards. Perhaps you can do the same?
Edit: Just to clarify… when you say “abruptly shutdown” do you mean removing the power without performing a regular Home Assistant shutdown?
Get the startup config where you want it, and flash an SD card per student.
Doubles up as stopping cheating / note passing between friends doing the lab by hiding stuff where you don’t see it.