- must not add insane amounts of cost to my power bill
- Has to be upgradable if I need to add upgrades to the hardware in the future
- Has a speaker
- may want to possibly also set up node red but it depends on if I need it or not because I may just be fine with home assistants automation
- has to have wireless connectivity
- mainly setting this up to add automation around my reolink cameras linked through the reolink home hub for example getting a second camera in the same area to start recording when one detects motion or link other smart home security products like sirens or floodlights
Eh, RPI pushes you to use a microSD card which sucks in a few ways. They also aren’t all that cheap.
Used thin client is the way to go
You can leave just the /boot partition in the SD and put the root fs in an external USB drive (SSD or mechanical).
I’have a SIMH emulation farm running inside a Pi3 which has been up literally for years. Zero trouble.
@Amberskin
On Pi5 no need for SD it boots and runs perfectly well from SSD.
Oh, really? I guess I’ll have to check the EEPROM stuff…
@traches
I completely agree. I started off using a rpi as this whole home automation thing was more of a test at first. Then the more I used it, the more I relied on it and it really bugged me when my sdcard failed and I could not restore the backup as well. I moved away from rpis for this and for anything of real importance ever since.
@18107
Just replying to agree to everything. You will also not believe just how fast home assistant feels running on an n100 compared to a RPI 4. Can’t speak of the RPI 5 wince I don’t have one, but unless you plan to interface with hardware, a used thin client mini PC just can’t be beat with the 5 being so expensive for this use case.