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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

#131

Post by rnestler »

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 currently run a home server on a librem laptop where I broke the lid and can't be opened anymore without breaking it further (I tried to repair it, but since some parts broke mechanically I couldn't really fix it)

Works kinda nice and is completely silent most of the time.

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#132

Post by djanogo »

zrail wrote: post #126
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…

Cool, and your elitedesk I believe comes with remote BIOS access with Intel vPro, that's even cooler, never have to plugin display.

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#133

Post by lazide »

antsar wrote: post #125
nomel wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... 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.

Another way to look at this - maybe this is a way to give a pressure relief valve for all the privacy conscious so they stop harassing them so much for the 90% of consumer case that doesn’t care?

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#134

Post by rubatuga »

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…

Using my HP Z230 with 16GB ECC RAM, multiple VMs, 2 NVMe SSDs, and 2x3TB HDD.

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#135

Post by zrail »

djanogo wrote: post #132
zrail wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Cool, and your elitedesk I believe comes with remote BIOS access with Intel vPro, that's even cooler, never have to plugin display.

Yeah. I haven't set that up yet after getting Proxmox up and running, but it's something that I should probably work on.

I've had such a good experience with this one that I keep trying to figure out if I can replace my Dell T20 minitower router running VyOS with one. The blocker is that the Dell actually has standard PCIe slots, whereas if I were to use a USFF I'd have to either go way up market to something like a Lenovo M920Q or accept USB ethernet adapters.

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#136

Post by rubatuga »

djanogo wrote: post #115
spookthesunset wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Same for my HP Z230. Literally have to be within a foot or two to hear it.

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#137

Post by jve »

alufers wrote: post #27
iandanforth wrote: post #18

Earlier 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.

I personally just flash everything possible with open-source software. All my light switches and Wi-Fi lightbulbs run Tasmota, which I password protect and semi- regularly update. The one odball is my Gree AC unit, which is on a separate WiFi network and subnet (I just run hostapd on my RPi since it's close-by). But it's more to protect it from the outside, not the other way, because it's controlled with JSON sent ov…

How did you find that out? You mean random UDP packet can destroy AC?

/me having a Gree unit that is to be installed

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#138

Post by rcarmo »

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…

I gave up on it solely because of the GUI. It's confusing as heck and very far from Apple's Home app, which is the preferred UX of the CFO (Chief Family Officer), even for fairly complex automations.

So I just used homebridge for everything, with a smattering of Node-RED for (very few) device shims (it is _very_ easy to do MQTT handling with it).

Also, I now have zero YAML to maintain, which is also a boon.

Kudos, though, for Home Assistant auto-discovery, which I use with my Tasmota-reflashed devices (there is a homebridge plugin that transparently adds them to HomeKit as soon as they're set up).

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#139

Post by belthasar »

paulmd wrote: post #104
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…

I've really wanted to get into this to some extent but it's such a complex (and expensive!) topic that I really would like some distilled knowledge from someone who's been through it and figured out what works and what doesn't, the pitfalls, etc. This is probably a good place to ask - does anyone know of a reliable guide (or ideally blog) to get started? Or maybe would be a good topic for a future HN submission. My p…

I’ve used Home Assistant on a Pi 3B+ for about a year now. My main objective is like yours, I want as few devices as possible connected to the internet and generally only buy devices that have a local API (local polling in HA terms). I do pay for Nabu Casa, HA’s cloud service for convenient access to everything but nothing I use requires it. This also help support a project that I really enjoy using and rely on.

I have most devices connected to an old wireless router that is completely disconnected from the internet. The raspberry pi is connected to my main network through ethernet and is connected to my “smart network” over wifi. I like to think of the HA instance as a two way mirror since it can reach the internet and see the devices but the devices themselves can’t phone home or access the internet in anyway.

For bulbs, light switches, and smart plugs I generally stick with TP-Link Kasa. The local API works great with HA though I believe they are removing this in future firmware updates [0]. This appears to be for the UK only but I’m not 100% sure on that. I purchased a plug a few months ago that still works.

My thermostat is a Venstar color touch with the local API. I have it connected to the internet but I could disconnect it and everything would still work how I want.

You can flash Wyze v2 cameras with the official RTSP firmware to view them locally. You lose some of the features of the Wyze cams but I think this is a fine trade off. While this works with the Pi, streaming video taxes it a lot. It isn’t a perfect experience by any means.

I also use Zigbee devices instead of Z-Wave (no real reason other than the first device I wanted was Zigbee). I have a Sonoff Zigbee bridge flashed with Tasmota that allows me to use any compliant (or quasi compliant in the case of Xiaomi Aqara) plug, motion sensor, temp sensor, etc across brands. The Zigbee bridge is also has access to the internet because it needs to connect to an NTP server. This means that these devices work fine when the internet goes out but if for some reason the hub gets power cycled while having an internet outage they stop working.

You can get Zigbee antennas that connect directly to the Pi but I avoided this because the USB ports can cause interference. You can fix this by getting a USB cable extender.

Feel free to ask any other questions about my setup.

[0] https://alerts.home-assistant.io/#tplink.markdown

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#140

Post by mindslight »

spookthesunset wrote: post #82
mindslight wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WHAT STORE DID YOU BRING THE PI TO? IS IT STILL THERE? I'll second the recommendation for real PC hardware. Tinkering is fun up until it's not. When it becomes not fun is when something breaks, takes down a system you have come to rely on, and now it becomes work to recreate the functionality you used to take for granted. Seeing people go for the RPi for something they're going to put a lot of hours into makes me cri…

You can fix that SD problem by booting off a USB SSD instead. Much faster and more reliable.

I want to use a Pi4 8GB as an arm64 build host so I'm going the USB SSD route there. But adding on additional hardware ultimately seems like the "stone soup" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Soup) version of setting up a server.

Furthermore I'm hesitant to rely too much on the arm ecosystem in general. If one pops a drive with a Linux installation into any amd64 machine, it straightforwardly boots. Whereas just making an arm device boot can be its own tinkering session of figuring out its own bespoke partitioning scheme, firmware files, and U-boot image. Many times you're stuck using a non-mainline kernel since that's what the embedded developers hacked on to get something running. Devicetree compiler what? And sure, using a purpose-built distro can hide much of the complexity, until that distro decides your device is too old and drops support.

Heck, I've even moved my wifi AP's over to low power amd64 machines instead of the popular answer of OpenWRT/DD-WRT. When I want to upgrade to a new wifi standard, I'll just pop in a new wireless card. The same machines also run Kodi for the TVs (which used to be separate RPis).

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