is my Rasberry Pi 5 really using all of its time showing a blinking terminal window ?
i mean, why is there not at least a browser so i can show the dashboard ?
it sits ideally for 99,9999% (yes this is accurate, actual calculated time 10 interactions pr day of 10 ms processor time ;)) of the time waiting for me to push a switch in a browser - is there not a better way to run Home Assistant ?
An RPI5 is indeed way overpowered for Home Assistant. So there is room for lots of addons, and even for things not related for Home Assistant. However, very few people have a screen attached to their RPI where Home Assistant runs on. And in order to run a browser, Home Assistent would need a graphical OS. Instead, if you use HAOS it has a very minimal OS, so it will run on smaller and less powerful RPI’s.
There are multiple installation options to choose from if you want to utilize the remaining capacity for other things. If all these things are available as addon then HAOS will do, if not you should look for other installation options. But these will require more knowledge and work from you.
I am afraid you should not get your hopes up that there will be an installation type that will include a graphical OS and browser though, as Home Assistant is meant to run headless on a server.
These replies… This is what people hate about this forum. No, most smart home equipment is expected to run as a client, to someone elses server.
At least give something else productive on the topic.
As with a lot of stuff, things are sold to people without the explanation as to what and why. Yeah, you bought a Pi(5) and are just running HA on it? You’re wasting a lot of CPU cycles. Good thing is its a Pi and it doesn’t really need much. That being said…
Can you do something else with it while its running HA? Of course! Run your own DNS, media server, file server, Mainframe (Hercules) emulator, (lightweight) desktop, recipe server, book server, and a lot more. Its up to you to do what you wish with the equipment on hand.
Rygaard, in the future, if/when you develop/install a more complex set of sensors/devices/helpers/integrations/dashboards, then the idle times might decrease.
As Edwin says, an Rpi5 is very powerful – enough to do image processing from cameras, voice recognition, home network firewall and proxy cacheing, even bitcoin mining if you are patient !
Most HAOS users don’t have a screen/keyboard attached to their PC or Raspberry Pi. Mine is in a cupboard under an aquarium.
HAOS is a small server OS.
My Raspberry Pi doesn’t have enough horsepower to run a browser. It is a Raspberry Pi 2, model B, with 1GB RAM. HAOS is installed on an 8GB microSD.
A few of my dashboards have 3 or 4 graphs on them, and at times, when I go to that dashboard from an external Mac/PC, I wait 10 or 20 seconds for the graphs to be generated.
Rygaard, I will happily swap Raspberry Pis if you think your’s is under-utilised?
As others have said, this is the way Home Assistant is designed. The idea behind that, AFAICT, is that not running other non-server applications on it improves stability. So you are not wrong.
That being said, Home Assistant is awesome in the fact that they let you use it in unintended ways. Here are some of the options:
Install Home Assistant Supervised and use the pi with the Debian OS for anything you want. I did this for a while on a Pi 3b with touchscreen but I found the installation and maintenance more work than I liked.
Install an OS of your liking on the Pi and run HA in a virtual machine. This is my current setup (on a Dell laptop, not a Pi). It needs a bit more resources than bare metal but with a Pi 5 you should have enough
Accept that running HA as a pure server is actually the most sensible thing to do, get a device that can work as a graphical interface check this thread for example and move on. That will be my setup when I next upgrade hardware
I played with running HA under another OS on a pi to run a dashboard and it was a pain to manage and configure, i’m nowhere near a good enough linuxer to solve that, not all HAOS/HACS features I wanted were easy to work around which was the main stinger for me.
Then I ran it on a low power miniPC with proxmox for a while with HAOS in one VM and a separate VM with a desktop linux OS to run the video output, but then i was dealing with unpredictable GPU pass-through that didn’t work 100% reliably on the hardware I had and all the associated issues with that.
Now HAOS just runs directly on a PI4 4gb, and I run a dashboard from a separate Pi4 that runs a desktop OS and a scripted kiosk mode web browser to bring up a ui, that feeds an input on my home video distribution matrix and can bring up a dashboard on any screen in the house with temperatures, device status, weather and a security camera feed. next step is making that interactive via IR… but that’s a job for another weekend or seven…