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Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

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Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#121

Post by nomel »

afavour wrote: post #76
djanogo wrote: post #42

Better yet, run your home on Dell/HP micro computers that get decommissioned by enterprises/hospitals/big-orgs every 3 years. Find them on Offerup or FB or Craigslist market place for $100-$200. These are built solid with metal enclosures, fan cooled, UL certified PSU, ~7k CPUbenchmark.net. Usually i5 6thGen Intel CPU, 8GB-16GB RAM and have REAL storage(SSD) and M.2 NVMe. If you are lucky you might find vPro version…

I did that too but those PCs are just stupidly massive for the purpose. Raspberry Pi 4s don’t require SD cards any more so the storage issue is moot. My RPi sits next to my router now, you wouldn’t even know it’s there unless you looked closely.

> My RPi sits next to my router now

Some brave souls have installed Home Assistant on their routers: https://www.snbforums.com/threads/home-assistant-entware-gt-...

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#122

Post by djanogo »

justin66 wrote: post #98
djanogo wrote: post #42

Better yet, run your home on Dell/HP micro computers that get decommissioned by enterprises/hospitals/big-orgs every 3 years. Find them on Offerup or FB or Craigslist market place for $100-$200. These are built solid with metal enclosures, fan cooled, UL certified PSU, ~7k CPUbenchmark.net. Usually i5 6thGen Intel CPU, 8GB-16GB RAM and have REAL storage(SSD) and M.2 NVMe. If you are lucky you might find vPro version…

> fan cooled As if that is a benefit. Putting a server in a corner of my home and forgetting about it is an application where I want the machine to be powerful enough to work without active cooling, as small as possible, and with no moving parts. None of these constraints is difficult to accomodate in this day and age.

Ya it's possible to build a fanless system, but Apple or any OEM with those parts is not going to sell you that system The fan ramps based on usage, as I said, Ubuntu server with HASS OS, VS Code Server, Netdata monitoring, NodeRed, Sonos Airplay, InfluxDB and few other containers, it's barely gets to 2% CPU usage and CPU temp at 25C.

Look at Pi, they have been at it for SO many years and that shit is slow with no real storage interface, they are only faster compared to their own previous generation.

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#123

Post by johnl1479 »

llbeansandrice wrote: post #92

Anyone have success with remote cameras? Services like Arlo and Ring seem straight up awful but also rolling my own seems like more effort and headache than it's worth.

I have had success integrate Ring and Wyze cameras through Home Assistant. If you'd rather not go that route, there is a project that publishes Ring cameras over MQTT and RTSP links: https://github.com/tsightler/ring-mqtt

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#124

Post by nomel »

rootusrootus wrote: post #111

I think a Pi is great to start with. Then you graduate to a real computer when your HA gets too big and laggy for the Pi to keep up with. I use a NUC. But my brother repurposed an old laptop with good results (built in UPS, and quiet!).

At what point does HA get too laggy? Are you doing audio/video transcoding?

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#125

Post by antsar »

nomel wrote: post #105
scottlamb wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still figuring out Home Assistant. I love that it has a real ecosystem and that it seems to have a decent HTTP/WebSocket API (that I just started playing with). Some things I don't love: * A lot of the integrations seem half-baked or to not quite fit the generic Lovelace cards. I think to some extent this is an inherent problem in supporting a lot of devices that have crappy, non-standardized APIs. Example: if I…

> ... for the off->on transition and another for the on->off. It'd be nice to set a rule that defines a level rather than an edge and have it internally do the transformation The "solution" I found was to poll, and use "choose", and sometimes some helper switches for state, to do what is needed. But, I think at any reasonable level of complexity, you're better off using one of the three python components: the one bui…

Matter is interesting. But...

> The project group was launched and introduced by Amazon, Apple, Google, Comcast and the Zigbee Alliance, now Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA).

I'm having a real hard time believing that anything user-beneficial will come of this, unless you're willing to sell out your smarthome and privacy to big tech.

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#126

Post by zrail »

djanogo wrote: post #42

Better yet, run your home on Dell/HP micro computers that get decommissioned by enterprises/hospitals/big-orgs every 3 years. Find them on Offerup or FB or Craigslist market place for $100-$200. These are built solid with metal enclosures, fan cooled, UL certified PSU, ~7k CPUbenchmark.net. Usually i5 6thGen Intel CPU, 8GB-16GB RAM and have REAL storage(SSD) and M.2 NVMe. If you are lucky you might find vPro version…

I just migrated all of my "production" home things to an HP Elitedesk 800 G3. It's great! Maxed out the ram and threw a 1TB SSD in. I'm using Proxmox and have:

* home assistant VM

* pi-hole primary LXC

* UniFi controller LXC

* media stack LXC (jellyfin is installed directly on the host to minimize hardware transcoding issues)

* a VM running various docker containers with dokku, including AppDaemon

It's barely ticking over most of the time and using very little energy.

We use zwave devices around the house and due to issues making zwave complex (RF + brick = bad, plus it's a very long house), I actually have a handful of Raspberry Pis with zwave sticks running zwavejs2mqtt scattered around. Yesterday I decided that I'm tired of dealing with the rPi-zero-W being so slow so I ordered a bunch of Dell Wyse 3040 thin clients off of eBay to replace them. Still trying to decide how I'm going to run them but probably it'll look something like Alpine diskless running docker and zwavejs2mqtt in a container.

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#127

Post by djanogo »

afavour wrote: post #76
djanogo wrote: post #42

Better yet, run your home on Dell/HP micro computers that get decommissioned by enterprises/hospitals/big-orgs every 3 years. Find them on Offerup or FB or Craigslist market place for $100-$200. These are built solid with metal enclosures, fan cooled, UL certified PSU, ~7k CPUbenchmark.net. Usually i5 6thGen Intel CPU, 8GB-16GB RAM and have REAL storage(SSD) and M.2 NVMe. If you are lucky you might find vPro version…

I did that too but those PCs are just stupidly massive for the purpose. Raspberry Pi 4s don’t require SD cards any more so the storage issue is moot. My RPi sits next to my router now, you wouldn’t even know it’s there unless you looked closely.

Did you read the part which says "micro", these are about 2-3x the size of Pi with those cheap plastic cases. I had mine beside the router before I moved it inside TV console.

Pi will be single purpose device, the "micro" can be full blown server and comes with ALL parts required, no need to hunt for good PSU, case, cooling, storage. Some of them come with 1 Sata and 2x M.2 NVMe, so you can literally pass those NVMe to TrueNAS in proxmox and run full blown NAS with encryption/encoding/decoding in VM.

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#128

Post by zrail »

spookthesunset wrote: post #83
djanogo wrote: post #42

Better yet, run your home on Dell/HP micro computers that get decommissioned by enterprises/hospitals/big-orgs every 3 years. Find them on Offerup or FB or Craigslist market place for $100-$200. These are built solid with metal enclosures, fan cooled, UL certified PSU, ~7k CPUbenchmark.net. Usually i5 6thGen Intel CPU, 8GB-16GB RAM and have REAL storage(SSD) and M.2 NVMe. If you are lucky you might find vPro version…

That is not a half bad idea. How loud are those things?

When my G3 (newer version of parent's machine) is booting up all of the VMs it's running it can get kind of noisy but it settles down quickly to basically silent.

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#129

Post by paulmd »

wyager wrote: post #64
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…

Pis are horrendously unreliable. Even if you pull out all the stops to make them work reliably (like disabling SD card writes), they don't. The broadcom chips they use are complete garbage. I was hopeful I could use the watchdog timer to make a pi more reliable (by restarting it when it inevitably crashed). Guess what? The internal watchdog timer doesn't f*cking work! You'll notice that every project using pi hardwar…

I played around with Pis a lot in the OG Pi 1B era and yeah, I got tired of fixing it every couple months (I attribute this to power quality and SD card failures) and just moved to using various x86 based systems. I used surplus SFF optiplexes from surplus sales (paid as little as $5 for some), AM1-based mITX (mobo+CPU for $50!), or Atom-based NUCs (used to get "surplus" J5005 NUCs with the plastic still on for $125).

I'm looking to get back into it with some Pi4s for a few things - but I'm planning to PXE boot this time around to try and sidestep the SD card/power problems. Basically just stuff like LibreElec to free up some of my J5005 NUCs for actual stuff.

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#130

Post by rootusrootus »

nomel wrote: post #124
rootusrootus wrote: post #111

I think a Pi is great to start with. Then you graduate to a real computer when your HA gets too big and laggy for the Pi to keep up with. I use a NUC. But my brother repurposed an old laptop with good results (built in UPS, and quiet!).

At what point does HA get too laggy? Are you doing audio/video transcoding?

Nope, nothing heavy like that. I don't know what the threshold is for every use case, but for me once I got more than maybe 50 devices, HA started to struggle on the Pi. The NUC is lightning fast, however, and I've grown my HA considerably since. Plus it's nice to be able to run ESXi on the NUC and have VMs for other things too, e.g. Grafana, etc.
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