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Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

pragprog.com

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Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#11

Post by wjdp »

nerdjon wrote: post #7

I have to ask others, have people had good luck with this? I have tried to do this multiple times, with multiple models of Pi and every time after 6ish months it just seems to completely stop working. I can't get it to boot even off of a new sd card. Am I doing something wrong or does the hardware really not want to be run consistently in this manner? I have since decided to just run some home automation VM's on my m…

Have had the same problems, though it's always the Pi chewing up the SD card, a new card solves it. These guides really need a warning saying "If you find this useful, switch to using a server that doesn't rely on an SD card after ~6 months"

The Pi is fantastic for getting a taste of self-hosting / home automation as it's so cheap but by no means should it be relied on.

I moved our Home Assistant install to a docker container on basic PC and it's been rock solid after several SD cards were eaten by the Pi. Though I still have DNS (via PiHole) running on a Pi and that's starting to act up.

Only time I've found Pis reliable is when they either don't write much or are running a read-only disk most of the time. We've a network audio player using piCorePlayer[1] on a Pi running for years and never had an issue, it's running tiny core linux and only makes the disk r/w when you're upgrading or changing settings.

I'm tempted to move my MQTT server to a Pi using tiny core as that'd keep messaging up while I'm rebooting or doing some other task on my single server. Something like http://akeil.net/posts/mosquitto-mqtt-on-tinycore.html

[1]: https://www.picoreplayer.org/

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#12

Post by h2odragon »

nerdjon wrote: post #7

I have to ask others, have people had good luck with this? I have tried to do this multiple times, with multiple models of Pi and every time after 6ish months it just seems to completely stop working. I can't get it to boot even off of a new sd card. Am I doing something wrong or does the hardware really not want to be run consistently in this manner? I have since decided to just run some home automation VM's on my m…

I've got "TV Pis" that idle LibreELEC/Kodi most of the time and have been running for 4+ years on the same SD cards (updated them a couple times in that time, not recently).

My "server Pi" is >3yo old, only turns off when the power fails, and doesn't do a lot with its SD card but the OS, but has never had an issue.

What kind of power are you using? I've got these on little 2.5a wall warts; the "server" has a scrounged 20 year old PSU pulled from a Cisco 2500 router running it and some other stuff. No UPS tho and we get power outages and weirdness as usual for a rural area.

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#13

Post by haunter »

I have a home system and tried RaspberryPi several times but in the end I went with an older Mac Mini. Old ones are quite cheap on the used market and also significantly more powerful than the RaspberryPi, that was one of the main reason in the end I rather chose that.

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#14

Post by jvlier »

sleepingadmin wrote: post #2

An upcoming project of mine is to setup magic mirror: https://magicmirror.builders/ Then start moving my other stuff onto the rpi as well like pihole for example. I wonder if RPI has a zigbee module or similar for automation. It doesn't seem like it? Anyone ever find anything like that?

Take a look at Zigbee2MQTT. Works on Pi with Zigbee USB sticks. Integrates with Home Assistant.

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#15

Post by andylynch »

nerdjon wrote: post #7

I have to ask others, have people had good luck with this? I have tried to do this multiple times, with multiple models of Pi and every time after 6ish months it just seems to completely stop working. I can't get it to boot even off of a new sd card. Am I doing something wrong or does the hardware really not want to be run consistently in this manner? I have since decided to just run some home automation VM's on my m…

For this kind of application, my own experience and others using home assistant seems to be your much better of plugging an SSD into the pi’s USB 3 and using that. It’s also really important to use a good power supply.

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#17

Post by contravariant »

kkielhofner wrote: post #5

Home Assistant[1] is the best approach I've found for this. It's pretty amazing but has a pretty steep learning curve (although they're getting better and better at this). The real power of HA is the rich integration ecosystem[2], the Community Store[3], and that it runs locally (more reliable and much faster for things like motion sensors, etc). It expresses everything from every integration as an entity in various…

Does anyone know how Home Assistant compares to node-red? As far as I can tell Home Assistant is better at building a dashboard of things, but node-red is better at actually automating specific actions (unless you want to grapple with HA's YAML based scripting language).

Is this about right? Is it possible to combine Home Assistant and node-red, or has Home Assistant outgrown the need for something like node-red?

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#18

Post by iandanforth »

kkielhofner wrote: post #5

Home Assistant[1] is the best approach I've found for this. It's pretty amazing but has a pretty steep learning curve (although they're getting better and better at this). The real power of HA is the rich integration ecosystem[2], the Community Store[3], and that it runs locally (more reliable and much faster for things like motion sensors, etc). It expresses everything from every integration as an entity in various…

How do you handle network security? I wouldn't trust an IoT device on the same network as any of my family's computers or phones for example.

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#20

Post by hotpotamus »

nerdjon wrote: post #7

I have to ask others, have people had good luck with this? I have tried to do this multiple times, with multiple models of Pi and every time after 6ish months it just seems to completely stop working. I can't get it to boot even off of a new sd card. Am I doing something wrong or does the hardware really not want to be run consistently in this manner? I have since decided to just run some home automation VM's on my m…

I'm with the others who have been running pi's for years with no issue. I did however go back into the office awhile back and stumbled across a pi display setup that had gone into read only at some point - most likely an sd card failure.

I would think if you want to take it up a step, you could look at something like an Intel NUC.

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