Anyone here using Home Assistant or ESP Home?

[richbee]

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

All gone now!

[Oldgreybeard]

The situation with the availability of Raspberry Pi's is a bit crazy. They've been close to unobtanium for around a year now, and there's no sign of them being readily available to non-commercial users anytime soon. Seems that almost all production is going to the commercial customers that embed them in other products, leaving very few for hobby users.

For any application that doesn't need the GPIO available on the RPi it does seem as if recycling used PCs makes more sense. The performance of some of the thin clients produced over the past five years or so is a heck of a lot better than that of a RPi, and they cost a great deal less. I did look at buying an Odroid N2+ to run HA, but the cost is way more than that of a second hand thin client box, the performance would be worse and the power consumption would be little different. The Odroid boards are good though, I've been running an Openmediavault NAS using an old Odroid HC1 for a long time now, and it's never missed a beat.

[Oldgreybeard]

If anyone is looking for a guide to installing HA on a thin client, then this video seems to show just how easy it is to install on the HP T530 (the T530 bit starts at around 2 minutes in).

[MrPablo]

Oldgreybeard, when you're set up with the T350, would you be able to measure power consumption at all?
I'd be interested to see how good it is, a friend is looking to set up HA soon.

[Oldgreybeard]

Oldgreybeard, when you're set up with the T350, would you be able to measure power consumption at all?
I'd be interested to see how good it is, a friend is looking to set up HA soon.

Yes, that will be easy enough to do, I have a power meter that I can plug it into to see what it draws. From what I've read so far, it looks like it idles at around 5W and runs at around 8W to 9W. My guess is that it will probably run at around 7W or so running HA, as the graphics won't be doing anything with no monitor attached.

[smegal]

If it helps anyone who's struggling to get a pi. I'm running home assistant in docker on my Synology Nas.

[richbee]

Sorry , can I just check - is a 'thin client' just a PC in essence? No extra spec required?

[Oldgreybeard]

Sorry , can I just check - is a 'thin client' just a PC in essence? No extra spec required?

Pretty much yes. Care is needed when looking for one, though, as there are some that are more versatile than others. There are a lot of (mostly older models) around that have soldered in RAM and an SSD, for example. There are also some secure units around that may not be a good choice. For example, when I was working we had thin clients on our desks, but they were super secure, with no stored content at all and a slot to take a security pass, together with a fingerprint reader. We'd slot our pass in, swipe a finger and the machine would open where it had been left when shut down, as in reality everything was running in a virtual machine on a secure server in one of our two data centres - our desktops were really just terminals. The idea was they were ultra secure, when a pass was pulled out there was no data on the desktop at all. Machines like this aren't much use for anything else.

There are a lot of less secure thin clients around though, that were used in customer-facing roles, retail etc, where only some data files needed to be centrally stored. These have full operating systems, rather than being as dumb as the thin clients we used, but they use a remote server for all file storage. These are the ones that are most useful, as they are really just low power, usually fanless and silent, PCs, albeit with limited storage. They only need enough storage for an operating system, plus whatever apps are needed, so commonly have maybe 8Gb, 16Gb or perhaps as much as 32Gb of SSD or eMMC. The ones with standard SSD storage are the best bet, as some can have normal amounts fitted and work fine as a relatively low power desktop.

I looked closely at the Dell Wyse 5060, for example. It has a pretty good spec and uses a compact SATA SSD. This limits the size of storage that can be fitted, not a problem for use with HA, but may be an issue for use as a normal desktop. By contrast, the HP T530 I've bought use a standard M.2 SSD, with space to take the largest ones available (2280), so it could easily be upgraded from 32Gb to at least 2Tb.

Same goes for RAM. Most newer (less than around 8 or 9 years old) thin clients seem to use standard SODIMM RAM. Some only have one slot, some may have two slots, so memory upgrades are also pretty easy if needed. Thin clients generally don't need a lot of RAM, so rarely come with more than 4Gb, and a lot only have 2Gb. For HA 4Gb is fine, 2Gb might be slightly limiting (the problem I'm having with the RPi is due to it only having 1Gb of RAM). For use as a normal desktop PC you might want to fit more RAM. If this is just a matter of swapping memory modules that's easy, if the thin client is one with soldered in RAM then it's near impossible to upgrade.

[Andy]

If it helps anyone who's struggling to get a pi. I'm running home assistant in docker on my Synology Nas.

I was doing that but at 40w that is almost £100 a year. Maybe £50 after solar contributions. It's been switched off for now.

It did have 4 drive bays all filled mind.

[Oldgreybeard]

If it helps anyone who's struggling to get a pi. I'm running home assistant in docker on my Synology Nas.

I was doing that but at 40w that is almost £100 a year. Maybe £50 after solar contributions. Its been switched off for now.

40W for a NAS seems high. I've been running Openmediavault on an old Odroid HC1, with a 2Tb SSD, for a few years now and that idles at around 3W, rising to around 4W when doing big file transfers or streaming video. I moved all our backup storage to two USB hard drives plugged into the wireless router, and they don't seem to have increased its power consumption much. At idle the power consumption hasn't changed, but the router does draw a couple of watts more when files are being shifted to or from the drives.

Overall, using the router as a very basic NAS is the easiest option to use we've found. We have a mix of Linux, Apple and Microsoft stuff and they all seem to be able to access the files on the router easily, whereas the Apple stuff has a bit of an issue communicating reliably with Openmediavault for some reason I've never been able to resolve.