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Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

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Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#81

Post by rkangel »

cpascal wrote: post #35
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…

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…

Alternatively you go PXE boot and network storage but then that assumes that you've got something else running to provide it. It's a nice solution when you've got half a dozen Pis around though (we use it in labs for our hardware test setups).

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#82

Post by spookthesunset »

mindslight wrote: post #65
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…

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.

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#83

Post by spookthesunset »

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?

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#84

Post by janitha »

dheera wrote: post #78
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…

I also hate that you have to install it as an OS or VM to be fully featured. If you use the docker version it is crippled with no "supervisor" mode. Also every now and then a light or switch will go greyed out in HA, their official apps still work, and I have to restart HA to be able to use it in HA again. Pretty annoying when you get home after a long day, soaked in rain, fumbling in the dark to turn on lights and n…

How is the container version crippled?

An anecdotal data point, but I've been running the home-assistant container image on k8s without any issue, and I have a lot of integrations.

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#85

Post by dheera »

janitha wrote: post #84
dheera wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also hate that you have to install it as an OS or VM to be fully featured. If you use the docker version it is crippled with no "supervisor" mode. Also every now and then a light or switch will go greyed out in HA, their official apps still work, and I have to restart HA to be able to use it in HA again. Pretty annoying when you get home after a long day, soaked in rain, fumbling in the dark to turn on lights and n…

How is the container version crippled? An anecdotal data point, but I've been running the home-assistant container image on k8s without any issue, and I have a lot of integrations.

You can't run HACS, supervisor mode, Kelvin-sun matching plugin ...

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#86

Post by spookthesunset »

andylynch wrote: post #15
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.

Bingo. Booting from an SSD is much better. Yeah it is a dongle dangling off the side of the Pi but it is much more reliable.

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#87

Post by aulin »

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've used the internal watchdog without any issue. I mean the one you enable from systemd with RuntimeWatchdogSec=10 (where 10 iirc is a number less than 14 which is the number of seconds where the timer overflows). Not really much to configure or customize but it works reliably.

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#88

Post by easton »

dheera wrote: post #78
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…

I also hate that you have to install it as an OS or VM to be fully featured. If you use the docker version it is crippled with no "supervisor" mode. Also every now and then a light or switch will go greyed out in HA, their official apps still work, and I have to restart HA to be able to use it in HA again. Pretty annoying when you get home after a long day, soaked in rain, fumbling in the dark to turn on lights and n…

Supervisor mode is basically operating system configuration stuff (DNS, audio, etc.) telemetry for the dev team, and health checking: https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2020/09/16/supervisor-joi.... (Unless I'm missing something?)

It seems fine that this isn't available in docker, since you can do all of this via docker and your host's configuration system. It would be nice to have a GUI for it, but if you need a GUI then you probably aren't running HA via docker, you used their image.

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#89

Post by aulin »

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…

The only time I've bricked a Pi ever was when I shorted 5V and 3.3V rails in a 3B+. A friend always talks about one bricked with an apt upgrade by a broken firmware or something, never seen anything like that. Saw plenty of dead or corrupted sdcards but that can be fixed with a new one, which doesn't seem to be your case. Maybe a bad power supply? Pi is a bit picky, you need one with 5.1V to prevent low voltage warnings.

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#90

Post by m0ngr31 »

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 setup Home Assistant to be able to talk to my solar inverters and see my battery voltage without walking out into the garage (over modbus).

Since then I started adding in door sensors and my thermostat. I just need to find a way to see how much propane I'm using and I'll be set.

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