Will a Raspberry Pi 3 do?

Because the raspberry pi 4 is hard to find i looked on a marketplace to buy one.
I found a Raspberry Pi 3 with 512 mb.
It that enough or could I rather wait until I find a 4 with enough memory?

Thanks in advance for the help!

If you are planning on using a Raspberry Pi to run Home Assistant, it is recommended to use a Raspberry Pi 4 with at least 2GB of RAM.

This will ensure that your Home Assistant instance has enough memory to run smoothly. The Raspberry Pi 3b with 512MB of RAM may not have enough memory to run Home Assistant and may result in performance issues.

It is generally a good idea to use the most powerful device you have available when running any software that requires a lot of processing power.

In addition, it is recommended that one uses SSD with USB ( 120GB will doā€¦) as the use of SD Cards eventually become problematic.

Oke thank you very muchā€¦So a Raspberry pi 4, in power, case , usb 2 ssd and an SSD drive ā€¦ It will be.

Are you hung up on a Raspberry?
I am running my Home Assistant on an Intel NUC i5 and it leaves the Pi4 in the dust. You can find them for under $100 on eBay:

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Why donā€™t you look for an Intel NUC / Lenovo style thin client?

If you get the lower end CPUā€™s they arenā€™t bad on power and give you more round flexibility.

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Oke i thought they would use more energy and these days they energy is expensive.
Will look at the nuc also

The RPI given its price and fact it is hard to find may no longer be the best option to run Home Assistant. There are many alternatives to an RPI, some use about the same amount of power or negligibly more. Take a look at this article

I run Home Assistant on a used Dell Optiplex

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It does use ā€˜moreā€™ but do not get hung up on mainstream full power desktop processor reviews. They publish stats flat out no stops because they want performance metrics.

NUCs run on what are basically laptop class cpus that offer way better power consumption than thier desktop counterparts and have amazing performance for the price. Itā€™s just in the pre-pandemic economy the Rpi kicked the snot out of them from a price standpoint. Now that the RPis are hard enough to find as to basically be a unicorn and stupid expensive when you doā€¦ The NUCs are a great option. If I were building right now for HA it would be a NUC with 8GB of ram and a nice fat SSD.

A 3B+ is OK, but not great for ESPhome compiles, and a 3 ā€œfeelsā€ about half the CPU of a 3B+ (which ws the first RPi that ā€œfelt usableā€ as a desktop). Anything older is basically a digital sign, or microprocesor with added screen.

HASS on my Yellow is currently using 1MB RAM, which is going to make a mess of a SD card when it tries to swap with only 512Mb of physical RAM

As others have said, there are Intel-based alternatives - and a ā€˜NUCā€™ is not the only option as companies are selling small form factor PCs from call centres cheaply (although Andreas slightly overstates the case for YTā€¦):

If this helps, :heart: this post!

In a box with old devices I have found a nettop nT-330i.
Will that be okay?

OS: Win 10 Home
CPU: Intel Atom CPU 330 @ 1.60 Ghz
RAM: 2 Gb (1,75 free)
HD: 18 Gb free disk space.

Hmm I now found at that for windows I need a VM etc. I donā€™t think that will run on this machine.

There are other/better ways then windows to run HA

Can you pioint me to a direction what i can do best with the device mentioned above.
I am a newbie here so i have no clue what I can do.

On that level HW I would wipe windows run haos natively. Otherwise it should be fine.

Is there a USB image to install HAOS natively?

Generic x86-64 - Home Assistant (home-assistant.io)

Thank you very much!

Regarding power use, my Intel based mini PC with quad core and 4GB RAM, running HA together with 4 different hubs needed, all plugged in one outlet have a power draw of 9-10 Watts.
Not bad for a machine, which outperforms the RPi very much.

Hey!
Saw this post, im a beginner at this and run my HA on a pi 3b, with an old android tablet as a wall panel.
Sometimes it works some times it crashes.

When it crash i get this error in the browser:

http://192.168.1.117:8123/?external_auth=1. Orsak:

net::ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT

Is that a fault that could happen as you said not running smoothly enough or is it completely different things?

Br

All that says is the tablet couldnā€™t connect anymore. Could be for a million reasons.

To know for sure you need to find the logs on the HA box and look there. Anything else - youā€™re guessing

That said, yes is itā€™s quite POSSIBLE. Thatā€™s the issue. (especially if youā€™re running more than core with a few devicesā€¦)

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Just to give another vote for a mini PCā€¦ :+1:

I migrated to a used Thin Client (with integrated SSD) some months ago by running HA with the native HAOS image.

In the end, way cheaper than a Raspi with all the necessary accessories but much more powerful and reliable.

(I still like the Raspi but for HA Iā€˜m happy with my Thin Client. :wink:)