What can we do on a RPI

Third party integrations Node-RED
1

Hi all.

I am very awate that this is a bit of an open ended question but

Running hassio on a RPI and Node red together I was wondering what our limitations are? What I mean is you can keep adding nodes to the library, creating flows, adding sensors etc but whats the easiest way to sort of judge what the limitation is? How much can the RPI handle?

Interested to hear everyones thoughts

2

How long is piece of string?

Personally I run a nuc. I used to run a pi and switched due to sd card corruption as opposed to performance, although the nuc’s performance is such that I wouldn’t go back, even if sd corruption could be fixed.

3

I was automating 20 switches, 20-odd lights, 8 motion sensors, a stack of input_booleans and various other things on the Pi. I noticed a significant reduction in the time it took between clicking the switch and the light going off when I got the NUC.

Before, you could feel the slight lag. Now it actually feels as if the button is properly linked to the light.

4

I’m running my Node-Red on a dedicated RPi which increased the responsetime significantly compared to what it was when I had it installed as HA with the onboard node-red add-on.

I’m running the automation for the below devices in Node-Red on 1 RPi

  • 5 x Alexa
  • 4 x Kodi Media servers
  • 20 x Door sensors
  • 12 x Motion sensors
  • 8 x Temperature sensors
  • 8 x MQTT sensors (Light, Temp, Water detection,etc)
  • 6 x rooms with a total of 30 lights (Hue, Tuya,etc)
  • additionally I have nodes running for Weather, Calendar, Traffic and Mail automation and a few more …

The RPI is barely using 10% of its resources with Node-Red and the there is almost no delay when I click a (xiaomi) buttone or when I give a voice command via Alexa. My RPI is connected via LAN directly to my gigabit switch. When using Wifi I was realizing a slight delay.

I have not used a NUC as the RPi performance was more than sufficiant so far (fingers crossed)

I’m running MotionEye with 4 HD cameras on a seperate RPI which is sending alarms to the above automation Node-Red. This RPi is often using ~70% of its memory when motion is detected on several cameras at the same time. 3 additional cameras are planned and I will put em on a seperate RPI… maybe this would be a used-case for NUC… i have to do some research

Hope this was helpful

5

Thanks for that. At the moment I am in a rural area and have slow internet. Thats my problem at the moment and not the rpi so still playing. That looks like it will do most of what I want and I am yet to try my mounting card I bought for the rpi’s

6

Most of your perfect home assistant setup should not depend on the internet.

7

I agree Nickrout. Its the google voice part that suffers. I also grabbed a Alexa to play with. I did find an Node-Red component that could work with it but it doesnt like the newversion 3 dot. The rest of it seems ok

8

Interesting! How straightforward is it to move to a NUC and what are the benefits?

I too am concerned that the SD card is the weakness in my system.

9

I found it simple, but I have been using linux for 20 odd years. I am using ha in a venv.

I did it in a bit of a hurry after my pi sd card showed signs of dying. I managed to rescue most of my config files.

The hardest part was figuring out some of ubuntu 18.04’s new network configuration, which was not a ha problem at all, and was well documented online.

1 Like
10

If you just want to find the limits then try sending a million messages a second over MQTT or something.

I’ve found NodeRED doesn’t eat a huge amount of memory if you don’t install lots of extra nodes, I really don’t think it needs a powerful machine but it depends on what you are making it do!