Anyone here using Home Assistant or ESP Home?

[smegal]

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.

There is that issue, they are pretty hungry. As it stands, my Nas is switched on, so may as well displace another device.

[smegal]

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.

My 4 may seems to draw 30W on average. The issue is 4 hard drives spinning is never going to be insignificant.

[richbee]

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.

That's great, thanks!

[pudding]

I've currently got an old Rpi3 running Pi hole and Domoticz I've been using for some automation, but its needed rebooting a few times and as its pretty damn old now, I'm slightly concerned the SD card could conk out, as has happened once before, leaving me with hours of work to get things back up and running.

I'm liking the sound of these and would like to set one up with Home assistant as it seems more popular than Domoticz, and also get my Unifi controller on there rather than the windows client from my laptop, and anything else funky they can be used for. Found these 2 HP T530's on ebay, can anyone shed any light on which one would be best, or another source for purchasing? Thanks.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/255805008129 ... 8IQAvD_BwE

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/255695703288 ... l0QAvD_BwE

[Oldgreybeard]

The £40 one should run HA just fine. I nearly bought that one, but yesterday there was a 32Gb model, with stand and power supply, for £44.99, and I thought it was worth the extra fiver to get double the storage, although I'm not at all convinced that I'll ever need 32Gb of storage, I think 16Gb would be more than enough.

[Stig]

I've currently got an old Rpi3 running Pi hole and Domoticz I've been using for some automation, but its needed rebooting a few times and as its pretty damn old now, I'm slightly concerned the SD card could conk out, as has happened once before, leaving me with hours of work to get things back up and running.

-snip-

I cloned the SD card and put it in a spare Pi after having a couple of failures.

( I'm using it to run a modified version of Raspberry-Pi-Home-Heating-Controller )

[AE-NMidlands]

NAS plugged into a router sounds a brilliant idea. I saw reference to the power needs of 4 spinning disk drives above, would a solid-state hard drive give the same result using minimal power? Or is their attached "computer" a necessary part?
A

[Oldgreybeard]

NAS plugged into a router sounds a brilliant idea. I saw reference to the power needs of 4 spinning disk drives above, would a solid-state hard drive give the same result using minimal power? Or is their attached "computer" a necessary part?
A

TBH, I only discovered that our router could work as a simple file sharing NAS and media server about a year ago. I noticed it had a couple of USB ports (one USB 2, one USB 3.1) and dug around a bit and discovered that it would happily accept a USB hub on the USB 3.1 port. I had a couple of spare 2Tb USB drives, ones that I'd been using to take backups by plugging them into the PC directly, and as an experiment I just plugged them both into the hub connected to the router's USB 3.1 port. To my surprise both worked and every device we have can access both drives easily.

The hard drives shut down after a minute or two with no use, so most of the time they are sat idling and only fire up when transferring files. The main disadvantage when compared to a proper NAS is that the transfer speeds aren't as fast. Makes no practical difference for me, though, as the only big file transfers are backups, and those are scheduled overnight. The speed is plenty fast enough to play HD video on the TV.

One other thing I discovered by accident was that the router also appeared automatically on Home Assistant as a media server. Not really played with this much. Apart from backups, the main things we use the router attached storage for is making files available to any machine in the house. Handy with a mix of different operating systems, where other ways of transferring files may not be that straightforward.

[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!

And then back again - at Pimoroni - in 1Gb & 4Gb form anyway with essentials kit - the base Pi is out of stock
https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/rasp ... 0476132435

[richbee]

While on the subject of Pimoroni - I was quite excited to see that they do a range of greenhouse automation products - froma alittle display with moisture sensors which also measure temperature, humidity etc - to tiny little pumps for automatic watering etc.
I love that idea - I'll have to try that at some point!
I used to have a very quick and dirty watering system for my old greenhouse, with a load of capillary tubes and and a 25l tub, fed by a pump on a timer, that would run for 2 minutes per day to fill the tub from the water butt - whicvh worked when I was away, but had no distinction between hot or cooler weather.
I've ordered a Pi to try and run HA with Sunsynk inverter data collection, so I'll see how that goes before I get ahead of myself!