What is the basis for your conclusion? How many SD cards / PIs / Power supply combinations do I have to go through before I have a workable system? I have installed on the hardware specified and according to the instructions on the HASSIO site. You need only to look at other comments in this tread to see I am not the only one experiencing stability issues with hassio on a raspberry pi.
Do you not have an old PC lying around to use?
But you think OpenHab will be better? Then in my book you think HA is bad. Mine has run for 6 months now without isdues, be it I dont use Rpi, I use a dedicated nuc for it.
You mean your hardware is too temperamental to be useful… It’s like you are driving in your car and you run out of petrol and then blame the car because it stops. Fix your hardware issues and you won’t have anymore issues. With the right hardware, a RPi setup will be stable for MONTHS at a time. Yes you could go for a NUC (which I have done now but NOT because the RPi was unstable or unusable - I wanted to add a bunch of other docker containers). The RPi is a great stable way to start with Home Assistant.
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Not quite accurate, hassio is not limited to rpi.
The reason I was looking at OpenHab was that it could be installed on a Mac, this was before I released home assistant could be as well (though without hassio).
Another feature I’ve found with OpenHab is that once booted, the system can be transferred from an SD card to a USB drive. I think that would improve stability quite a bit. That might be something HA should consider implementing.
True, though the instructions on the HA site mention the PI and I thought that would be a good solution. I understand that HA could be stable on other systems, but I am referring specifically to the Raspberry Pi implementation.
No it isn’t. Three SD cards, four rebuilds, numerous crashes in less than two weeks demonstrates that.
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Think about it. If what you’ve experienced happened to everyone using an RPi … no one would be using it. There would be existing threads warning everyone to avoid it and it would probably disappear from the documentation as the suggested introductory platform.
Except there are no such threads, it is the suggested introductory platform, and it has been used successfully by many people for several years (HA is > 5 years old).
Sorry to hear you’ve had a very bad experience with it but don’t conflate it to mean it’s par for the course.
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On the other hand there are many threads seeking advice on what to replace the pi with.
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Yup, “introductory” being the key word in “introductory platform”. Eventually those long reboots lose their welcome and make one look for hardware with more oomph.
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I’m dubious that the fault is with writing to dodgy SD cards, although maybe they get corrupted during the process. In all my cases, a power cycle gets it working again. My two Pi Zeros are just running the monitor script, and a cursory glance suggests it’s not doing writes. They die more often than my 3B+ running hass.io.
My main hass.io is rock solid and runs on an old Windows machine (Ubuntu under a VirtualBox VM). I used a very excellent YouTube walkthru to get it up and running.
Powercycling is the quickest way to corrupt an SD-Card. HA writes to the card so much it’s guaranteed to end in tears eventually.
Yeah well… except using a high endurance or better quality card and the problems miraculously go away.
To be clear, that’s not a feature of openHAB but of one specific installation method it has called openHABian. That’s a disk image intended for an RPi containing the Raspbian OS, openHAB, and customization menu called openhabian-config (it replaces Raspbian’s default raspi-config). This menu offers several administration functions including one called ‘move root to USB’.
If you search openHAB’s community forum, you’ll discover this feature is not always painless.
For both openHAB and Home Assistant, switching from an SD card to an SSD is a matter of copying the SD card’s image to the SSD. There’s also some tweaking needed to make an RPi 3 boot directly from the external SSD (i.e. make it bootable without an SD card present).
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In combination with a proper power supply!
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Booting a RPi from SSD - I have been reading up on this with a view to giving it a go (maybe). I saw that the RPi 3B+ can boot from USB out-of-the-box.
Does this mean that simply copying the hassio image from the HA homepage to an SSD would give a fully working system just waiting for a snapshot to be loaded?
Given all the forum posts around this subject that seems far too easy 
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No it won’t work. So far as I have seen there is no way to boot HassOS off a USB drive. It was possible with the ResinOS version or you can install Raspbian and Docker and use a generic linux install for Hass.io which works really well. I was using that prior to getting my NUC (when I wanted to play around). I also ran Hass.io with ResinOS and Hass.io with HassOS both 64bit and 32bit. I did at one point have a lot of lockups and issues but that stopped when I got rid of the SD-Card I was using.
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I should’ve been more specific and indicated Hassbian because that’s a similar arrangement to openHABian (a disk image of Raspbian OS + home automation software + customization menu). As per David’s post above, it doesn’t apply to Hass.io which is a different beast.
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Sure, but I am far from alone in experiencing stability issues with HA on a Raspberry pie.
I could go out and buy another pi to replace the brand new one I was using and get yet another SD card. Maybe that’ll address the issue, but maybe I’ll burn another three SD cards. I could get another power supply, but I’m already using the official supply (as recommended). The costs of that quickly escalate, with no real reason for me to expect a stable system will come out of that.
It would be better if the developers could perhaps look at a system that boots the pi from an SD card and operates from a usb stick or ssd drive, as openHAS seems to be able to do.
Its great that others have had success, but based on my experience, I just do not have confidence in the ‘HA on the Pi’ concept as it currently exists.