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!).
Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi
111–120 of 276 posts
Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe the power supply is the issue. Every time I have setup I pi I would get the Canakit sets so maybe it is just not suitable?
Make sure to check the USB cable you use. I have a few which has ~1 Ohm resistance, and given that the Pi can use 1-1.5A under load that translates to a 1-1.5V cable drop. This can cause the Pi to shut down, and SD cards are not happy losing power while writing AFAIK. I've had multiple Pi's run for years off the same SD card without issue. My Home Assistant install has a 3GB database with updates every few seconds du…
Not only are SD cards not happy with losing power during writing, but they are very sensitive to "brownout" undervoltage conditions. In this case writes may appear to succeed but actually fail to commit, which is obviously problematic for the integrity of your data.
(if people were using a checksumming filesystem like ZFS, this of course would be immediately apparent when it was occurring!)
Samsung sells "high endurance" SD cards - I would strongly recommend these for RPi usage, and they are also very useful for dash cams since those are always continuously writing as well. Sandisk sells high-endurance cards as well but frankly Samsung is a cut above the rest of the SD card market - my SD card failures have essentially gone away since I stopped buying other brands. I think I have had one SD card failure since then and it wasn't related to write endurance, just didn't use it for a couple years and it was dead when I tried it again.
But yes, in general, power quality is a massive problem for RPis, and people don't really consider it because it's one of those "it works 99.9% of the time" situations. It's like a race condition that you only rarely ever hit, it looks correct and people will die on the hill of "it's worked perfectly fine for months now, the power can't be a problem" and then you hit a weak flash cell when the CPU is heavily loaded and the voltage is starting to droop and it happens to be a critical file rather than just some log or a chunk in an audiovisual file somewhere, and then you notice it.
I'd say >95% of all Pi failures come down to either power problems or SD card wearout. They're certainly not otherwise flawless, it's a janky cheapass SOC in general, but that is the overwhelming cause of Pi system failures.
If you can swing it, network booting from a fileserver is a much more reliable option in the long run. I haven't really experimented with it, and performance will probably be worse, but it gets the SD card out of the equation entirely, which mitigates both of these problems. You're not writing to flash, so brownout doesn't matter in terms of the potential for failed writes, and you aren't writing to a physical SD card so there's no wear.
Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi
#113Better 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…
> [...] Currently running a HP G2 [...] Great, except it's fucking huge and noisy. I'm running a kubernetes cluster on a pair of raspberry pi and a 4-bay NAS as storage. What kind of lunatic would store data on a single, non-redondant, disk or an SD card ?
It's the twice the size of Pi with case, not sure what's "massive" about it.
Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi
#114Home 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…
I had a terrible experience with Home Assistant. Slow, buggy, unreasonably difficult to implement non-trivial automations. My heuristic since then has been to minimize the amount of node.js in my home automation codebase and this has worked wonders for its reliability and usability; currently the only component I still have that's node-based is zigbee2mqtt, which (possibly not) incidentally gives me more issues than…
I'm not understanding how node.js relates to Home Assistant (written in python)?
Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi
#115Better 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?
Barely audible, you have to have your ear <1ft from it to hear the hum.
Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi
#116Better 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…
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Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
For me I mainly use Zigbee and Zwave Devices not WiFi Devices. I am sadden that wifi seems to be taking over and ZigBee and Zwave are starting to lose favor.
I like to believe that it's because matter protocol is on its way, so hardware isn't being developed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_(standard)
But, I think it's actually because wifi is easier for the average person to get working. With Zigbee, you need a Zigbee hub, but sometimes you need a brand specific Zigbee hub, sometimes you don't (even though it's advertised that you do), and sometimes the Zigbee compliance is so bad that adding a device from another vendor break your whole Zigbee network (looking at you Aquara). Zwave throws more incompatible hubs to the mix. And, even within these, it's rare to have devices work with each other in a way that makes sense.
Hopefully matter saves us, so I don't have to install 5 integrations in Home Assistant to remind me that my car isn't plugged in at night or my back window is open, while the heater is on, and then another to make any of it accessible to HomeKit.
Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi
#118Slightly OT: > Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi If you can get hold of one! I've been looking for a Pi4 for ages to use with PiHole but sold out everywhere, some have back orders for 2023 O_O Anyone got any recommendations of other devices that work well with PiHole? I have a Mac Mini acting as a home server but from what I've read, PiHole does not run great on it via Docker...
They only made 150k in all of 2021, so we're seeing the result of that right now. Good news is they're expecting to make 250k in Q1 2022 with 500k planned for Q2.
Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi
#119Home 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…
They've also been pretty hostile to OS packagers trying to let you run it without dedicating an entire device to it, most publicly NixOS but they indicated they planned to insist the same against Fedora and Gentoo too: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/126326 That behaviour kind of makes it hard to trust that it won't lead to the next Marak situation.
I've been running homeassistant installed by pip3 for years now (before they even had a os) and that has always worked fine.
Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi
#120Home 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…
I had a terrible experience with Home Assistant. Slow, buggy, unreasonably difficult to implement non-trivial automations. My heuristic since then has been to minimize the amount of node.js in my home automation codebase and this has worked wonders for its reliability and usability; currently the only component I still have that's node-based is zigbee2mqtt, which (possibly not) incidentally gives me more issues than…
I do the same for the automation part (mosquitto+zigbee2mqtt+custom scripts), but I do have Home Assistant for GUI and logging. For example I have a card in Home Assistant that shows whether any system at home doesn't ping.
Here is an example of an automation script, turning a zigbee plug on/off depending on solar roof output: https://gist.githubusercontent.com/bonzini/c705bdd47fd5cd16a...