Hi
In short: I’d like to purchase hardware to create a resilient HA installation. Advises for HW please
Background: My family have two houses that are far from where we live. It takes roughly 9 hours to get there. As the place is fairly remote, power outages happen from time to time, and can last for hours up to days. There’s a lot of things I’d like to do with the houses in terms of automation, but I need a HW platform that is as solid as possible. If I’m going to use HA for something truly useful, I need to trust it to be working. Having to to spend 2 days travelling just for the purpose of hard-rebooting my HA is no fun at all.
This brings us to the question - what hardware should I get in order to create such a resilient installation as possible? My ideas are the following:
First of, it’ going to be based on a Raspberry Pi. Perhaps version 3 to avoid the heat issue of the 4. (No, I don’t need more performance than a Pi for my use cases)
UPS: Raspberry Pi should be fitted with a UPS. But out of the one’s I’ve found, I haven’t understood if it has the capability to boot the RPi after the UPS has run out and power returns. A UPS would be contra-productive in such cases. Any insights here?
Memory card: A memory card that is unlikely to fail. My research tells me I should be looking for terms like “Application Class 2 “high endurance”, “Wear Leveling”.
Internet connection. I was first planning on using battery powered WLAN-router, but realized that it introduces a point of failure (someone unplugs it, it runs out of battery during power outage and does not start again). I would trust a USB-connected 4G-stick to be more reliable. Is there any list of recommended USB-dongles for a RPi/HA setup?
You do realize HA is beta software? Honestly your use case and requirements describe a more robust system than any hardware HA runs on might be able to provide. You might be better off with a security system that has an automation system built in. They have battery backups, remote monitoring independent of internet provider and most have an app. Not trying to discourage you from continuing with HA, just trying to let you know what system might best suit your apparent expectations of said system.
if you must there are ups hats available for the pi… i would go or a stand alone ups that was NUT capable on the hopes of also keeping the internet connection up long enough to allow notifications to be sent (assuming the internet is beyond you and your provider. if your modem/ap/whatever goes down you stand zero chance of sending notifications).
either way shutdown the PI before batteries die and all should be good once power comes back up.
look at moving log (os & ha) to usb dongles (logs) and a micro sd in a usb adaptor – HA sqlite db hates slow IO – while your are there knock down all logging .
most importantly make sure it comes up and is at least SSH accessible, toss in naba casa for the additional connectivity and management options.
rpi-clone and a solid change management strategy… would also go the docker route for the simplicity of upgrades from a roll back perspective.
you will have to have your ducks in a row, but can done.
If you must use a rPi and don’t need much power then use a 3B and set it up to boot from USB and plug in a SSD. No SD card issues then. There are threads on this forum with instructions etc.
Regarding cold boot. I use Tapo TP110 smart plugs for many sockets throughout our home.
If I need to reboot my HA installation where it has hung when away I can power cycle the Tapo plug remotely using the Tapo app. This will then trigger the rPi to reboot when power is reapplied.
