Anyone here using Home Assistant or ESP Home?

[richbee]

It's a very powerful setup, though by no means straightforward, I can see why so many people buy HomeKit and Alexa setups, most folks wouldn't put in the effort to get it working.

That would be me - with Alexa, Philips Hue and Tado heating controls - they are pretty good, if not as controllable as the kind of system you guys are programming.
I would like to get a better solar monitoring system as the app is a bit rubbish and temperamental - maybe Home assistant (If I keep watchin these threads), or Solar Assistant - but like has been noted, Raspberry Pis are like gold dust currently

[MrPablo]

Quite a few people are starting to use thin clients or low power surplus office pcs due to the RPI4 shortage.
I too had issues with ESP Home compiling on my RPI setup but the move to a lower power pc has meant a lot more horsepower to play with.

[smegal]

Overkill, but there are done 8gb rpi4b available at the moment.

[SafetyThird]

It's a very powerful setup, though by no means straightforward, I can see why so many people buy HomeKit and Alexa setups, most folks wouldn't put in the effort to get it working.

That would be me - with Alexa, Philips Hue and Tado heating controls - they are pretty good, if not as controllable as the kind of system you guys are programming.
I would like to get a better solar monitoring system as the app is a bit rubbish and temperamental - maybe Home assistant (If I keep watchin these threads), or Solar Assistant - but like has been noted, Raspberry Pis are like gold dust currently

For the past 3-4 years I've been using some Shelly switches flashed with HomeKit firmware to control and automate some lights, there wasn't much else to automate as we only heated with wood stoves and had an Eddi feeding excess solar to the thermal store. HomeKit runs locally off my Apple TV and the remote access is through Apple's servers and is very secure. It was good enough for what I wanted. I don't really want or need voice control but I wanted to keep the devices as secure as possible.

Since getting GSHP and full central heating installed, I wanted to have better monitoring of everything to understand what energy we were using and when, and how to make best use of it. With the addition of an AC battery setup, that's even more important. I'm prepared to put in more effort now, and spend some money on monitoring gear, as the payback is so fast with the current cost of energy, hence the move to Home Assistant.

Also, seeing the monthly videos that 'The EV Puzzle' has been posting on YouTube and, in particular, this one made me want to dig deeper into it. It's not cost me anything so far for Home Assistant as it's running in a virtual machine on my ancient Mac mini server that I use as a print, media and backup server.

[Oldgreybeard]

Quite a few people are starting to use thin clients or low power surplus office pcs due to the RPI4 shortage.
I too had issues with ESP Home compiling on my RPI setup but the move to a lower power pc has meant a lot more horsepower to play with.

I'm about to hit the button and buy a thin client, an HP T530, with 4Gb RAM, 32Gb SSD. Seems they are actually cheaper (second hand) than a Raspberry Pi, especially taking into account that they come with a case, power supply, SSD storage etc. Looks like about £40 or so gets a reasonable spec machine, that doesn't use a lot more power than the RPi, I've spent £45, including postage, for a 32Gb machine, rather than a fiver less for a 16Gb one, although I suspect that 16Gb is fine for a reasonably big HA installation.

Setting up a new HA system also gives me the option to tidy things up a bit, as I've played around a fair bit with different setups with the RPi version and now have lots of entities I no longer use.

[MrPablo]

Quite a few people are starting to use thin clients or low power surplus office pcs due to the RPI4 shortage.
I too had issues with ESP Home compiling on my RPI setup but the move to a lower power pc has meant a lot more horsepower to play with.

I'm about to hit the button and buy a thin client, an HP T530, with 4Gb RAM, 32Gb SSD. Seems they are actually cheaper (second hand) than a Raspberry Pi, especially taking into account that they come with a case, power supply, SSD storage etc. Looks like about £40 or so gets a reasonable spec machine, that doesn't use a lot more power than the RPi, I've spent £45, including postage, for a 32Gb machine, rather than a fiver less for a 16Gb one, although I suspect that 16Gb is fine for a reasonably big HA installation.

A good choice, you should be able to upgrade the storage without too much hassle as well, if desired.
https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/hp/t530/

[Oldgreybeard]

A good choice, you should be able to upgrade the storage without too much hassle as well, if desired.
https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/hp/t530/

I used that website to select from the myriad of thin clients around, as it seemed to be the one place I could find that had the specs, including the power consumption for lots of different models. Bit of an iterative process, checking out possible models one by one, then looking to see what was available at a reasonable price. I opted for the HP T530 primarily because it has a fairly low power consumption, as well as because it uses a standard M.2 SSD, makes it easier to upgrade and also easier to set up, as there's an option to just burn an HA image directly to the SSD, and it so happens I have an M.2 to USB adapter, so I should be able to just whip the SSD out and use that to set the machine up.

[Andy]

https://thepihut.com/products/raspberry ... 4566639678

11 left of the 8gb variant. I haven’t seen anything for sale anywhere for months. £117 with postage

[Oldgreybeard]

https://thepihut.com/products/raspberry ... 4566639678

11 left of the 8gb variant. I haven’t seen anything for sale anywhere for months. £117 with postage

Makes the HP T530 I've just bought for £45 look like a bargain!

[MrPablo]

Perhaps I should put my RPI 4 4gb on ebay! Those prices are just too high to justify vs a low power x86 machine.