Anyone here using Home Assistant or ESP Home?

[pudding]

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.

So my little HP T530 arrived last week. Got some days off end of this week so might have some time to sit down and try and get Home Assistant up and running on there. Any guides on how to get it up and running, and the OS installed on a slim client PC like this? Is it possible initially without a monitor and keyboard/mouse attached, like with the Rpi and SD card?

[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.

So my little HP T530 arrived last week. Got some days off end of this week so might have some time to sit down and try and get Home Assistant up and running on there. Any guides on how to get it up and running, and the OS installed on a slim client PC like this? Is it possible initially without a monitor and keyboard/mouse attached, like with the Rpi and SD card?

Mine's not arrived yet (not sure why) but there is this guide that shows how to copy an image on to the SSD in these thin clients (it does need a USB adapter for the SSD to do it, though). The T530 bit starts at about 2 minutes in - the first part of the video isn't relevant:

[pudding]

Thanks for the link and vid. So we need to pop open the case eh, shouldn't be a problem, and then an adapter like this - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Adwits-SuperSp ... 58&sr=1-24 in order to flash the Home Assistant OS onto the SSD?

[Oldgreybeard]

Thanks for the link and vid. So we need to pop open the case eh, shouldn't be a problem, and then an adapter like this - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Adwits-SuperSp ... 58&sr=1-24 in order to flash the Home Assistant OS onto the SSD?

Yes, that should do the job OK. You can get the same thing a bit cheaper here: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/303921142782 ... 46c31c9bfe

[Fintray]

Mine's not arrived yet (not sure why) but there is this guide that shows how to copy an image on to the SSD in these thin clients (it does need a USB adapter for the SSD to do it, though). The T530 bit starts at about 2 minutes in - the first part of the video isn't relevant:

I was looking for a Rpi to start with Home Assistant when I read your post about the HP T530, so bought one at £44.99 on the 3rd November on Ebay and it arrived on the 7th, maybe worth checking with the sender of yours.

[Oldgreybeard]

Mine's not arrived yet (not sure why) but there is this guide that shows how to copy an image on to the SSD in these thin clients (it does need a USB adapter for the SSD to do it, though). The T530 bit starts at about 2 minutes in - the first part of the video isn't relevant:

I was looking for a Rpi to start with Home Assistant when I read your post about the HP T530, so bought one at £44.99 on the 3rd November on Ebay and it arrived on the 7th, maybe worth checking with the sender of yours.

Thanks, I've messaged the seller yesterday, as it was supposed to arrive by 7th November. Not heard back from them yet. Tracking shows it as being "in transit" so my best guess is that it's been caught up by the effects of strike action, perhaps.

Edited to add: As I was typing the above an email pinged in. It's out for delivery today, it seems. Just checked the detailed tracking history and it looks as if the seller didn't actually get around to despatching the thing for a week, so the delay hasn't been down to the courier at all:

Parcel tracking.jpg (34.04 KiB) Viewed 3705 times

[Tinbum]

Often the case.

[Oldgreybeard]

My T530 turned up this afternoon, so some early observations on setting up HA. First some simple stuff, the video shows how to copy HA on to the SSD that is in the T530 and I can confirm this works fine with a USB to M.2 adapter.

You need a monitor or keyboard to set up the BIOS in the T530, there's no way around this as by default these boxes are set up for secure boot and that needs to be disabled (as described in the video), plus the boot disk order needs to be set.

Any old USB keyboard is fine, but the choice of monitor connections is limited to either Display Port or old style VGA. I had an ancient VGA monitor in the spare room so dug that out and used it, which was sort of OK but not great as I couldn't adjust the horizontal position enough to get all the text on screen. Display Port would be better, no need to fiddle around to try set the right position on the screen.

Once you've got to the stage where it's booted into HA you can remove the monitor and keyboard, after noting the HA URL (or the IP address and port). From then on you can just use the HA server on any other device to get to the HA homepage and set the rest up.

[Fintray]

Glad to hear that it has turned up.
I was a bit the same when setting it up, went into the study but realised I don't have an ethernet connection in there, wired it to an old wall mounted monitor and set up what was needed (apart from it couldn't get a connection!). Took it into the garage where it will live and tried to connect to it from my laptop, this didn't happen as it didn't have an ip address from the initial set up. Then had to go back into the study remove monitor from wall and take to garage along with keyboard and set it up correctly this time. Seems to be ok but don't have much on it yet.

[Oldgreybeard]

It's definitely a LOT faster than when HA is running on a Raspberry Pi. First thing I did was update HA, something that takes forever on the RPi, but was a heck of a lot quicker on the T530. That bodes well for some other things I'd like to add to HA, like one or two CCTV cameras, perhaps. I think trying to stream video with a RPi would probably be something of a struggle when HA is trying to do other stuff.

I was going to just clone my existing setup on to the T530, but think I'll take the opportunity to start from scratch and fix some of the things I didn't do that neatly originally, like choosing names for things that then got a bit confusing. For example, choosing to use "House" as the name of the HA instance resulted in loads of entities having names like "House house power", which looks a bit untidy.