I am a fanatic of embedded stuff and home automation. I love the RPi to death but am wary of wanting it to run its programs from an SD card. Any pointers to alternatives?
Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi
221–230 of 276 posts
Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi
#222I am a fanatic of embedded stuff and home automation. I love the RPi to death but am wary of wanting it to run its programs from an SD card. Any pointers to alternatives?
Any PC built int the last 15 years.
Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi
#223Am I the only one who still has yet to understand the value proposition of a smart home [outside wifi + sonos]? The trade off isn't a clear win to me for me to automate everything else. If it was I would try a raspberry pi set up.
The starter for me was that my solar inverter (Fronious) wanted $199 per year for more than three days history, but exposed a very readable JSON over http interface. I had low watt PC handy (HP Microserver G7) doing nothing, so installed Home Assistant for long term tracking instead. After that, it kind of just snowballed.
Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi
#224Unless it magically cleans and tidies everything I really don't see the appeal of home automation. Pressing a switch is far more convenient to me when walking into a room than fishing out a smartphone - whether it be through a raspberry pi or otherwise. Same with central heating, I rarely need to adjust it and I don't see the appeal of messing around with some integrated interface, i'd rather an old fashioned radiato…
100% agree on this. There are very few things I want to do on a daily basis from my phone instead of from a physical switch. One exception is controlling my bedroom lights which I do with Hue lights from my bed. The other thing I want to automate is music to start playing when I enter the bathroom, to give me privacy in there when my girlfriend is home. And that’s the startup I’m working on: https://Loodio.com since…
Just get a battery powered rotary smart switch and mount it on your nightstand! Game changer
Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi
#225I 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…
It might be the Pi wearing out the SD card. The Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 [1] actually has a PCIe Gen 2 x1 socket. Jeff Geerling (who's active on HN) has actually gotten SATA working [2] through the Compute Module 4 and the Compute Module 4 IO Board [3]. If you go his route you could potentially set up a Pi with more durable storage. Although, if you watch Jeff's video its a PITA getting SATA working as he had to…
The new Home Assistant Yellow board even has a built-in M.2 M-key slot for NVMe storage; there are some other boards out there with built-in slots too (I especially like the BitPiRat I recently tested: https://pipci.jeffgeerling.com/boards_cm/mirkos-bitpirat-com...
Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Ubiquiti Access Point AC Mesh Pro[0] (~$200) appears to support multiple SSIDs and VLANs. Of course you'd need at least two of them to count as a "mesh", which is $400… was your $500 budget per access point or for the whole system (and if so, for how many APs)? [0] https://store.ui.com/products/unifi-ac-mesh-pro-ap
2 will cover my needs. Do they actually work like a mesh? As in use backhaul radio to communicate between them and allow seamless switch from one to another as you travel around your home?
Yes, this model supports Wireless Uplink with Plug & Play Mesh:
> Wireless Uplink functionality enables wireless connectivity between APs for extended range. One wired UniFi AP uplink supports up to four wireless downlinks on a single operating band, allowing wireless adoption of devices in their default state and real-time changes to network topology. For devices that support Plug & Play Mesh, this functionality is extended to allow multi-hop wireless uplink – so wirelessly uplinked APs can support uplink to other wirelessly uplinked APs.
(quote is from the datasheet PDF)
Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi
#227One of the scary things (for me) when it comes to home automation and DIY smart home tech is that there's so many options that I feel totally overwhelmed. For the last few months I've wanted to do a small setup with sensors around my apartment that measure temp, humidity, air quality - and a few more for my upcoming chili pepper growing setup in the kitchen. There's so many options each with their own advantages & disadvantages - even on the air filter side there's pages of discussions about the various filters possible and how some don't collect particles below a specific size. I certainly miss the geeky/tech circle of friends I used to live near which would always have an friend (or a friend of friend) who was an expert on basically any matter!
Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
100% agree on this. There are very few things I want to do on a daily basis from my phone instead of from a physical switch. One exception is controlling my bedroom lights which I do with Hue lights from my bed. The other thing I want to automate is music to start playing when I enter the bathroom, to give me privacy in there when my girlfriend is home. And that’s the startup I’m working on: https://Loodio.com since…
Just get a battery powered rotary smart switch and mount it on your nightstand! Game changer
My phone is always with me so it’s just a voice command with Siri of top down swipe to access switch on the phone “dashboard”
Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi
#229Home 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…
Do I really need to do Home Assistant Operating System? It stresses me out that this is not just some packages I can install.
Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah primarily I'm concerned with availability. I have a "production" hypervisor now with all of the household services running on it that I've promised my spouse I wouldn't mess around with which cuts off one avenue of experiments.
Ah yeah, I definitely have the distinct advantage of living with me, myself, and I :)
In this case, if maintenance starts happening without your knowledge, something else is going on.