Curious what was the model of your drive failure? I have 6 years now on a bunch of 8TB WD Elements/EasyStore drives as well as some 10TB-14TB WD MyBook, Elements, and refurbished WD drives from serverpartdeals in the preceding years. Still no failures yet but I’m expecting one eventually.
I’m currently running mine on Windows and use SnapRAID and DrivePool as my defense against drive failures. I think I have 7 data drives and 2 parity at this point (totalling around 90TB). Beyond that I copy the Snapraid whatchamacallit to a separate backup drive along with my OS drive. This isn’t really a ‘backup’ but in the scenario where I have several failures and no way to restore, I still have radarr/sonarr keeping track of my library and a membership to several private trackers.
I wouldn’t worry too much about losing media files as most can just be downloaded again. I find it more beneficial to make use of all the storage space you can rather than trying to do a 1:1 backup, which gets pretty absurd once you start getting up there in movie/TV count.
You can still use one of these with the NAS as storage. A Synology doesn’t have a lot of horsepower to run programs directly on their hardware so if you plan on doing something like a media server you might encounter some issues. An optiplex (or any other PC) running Proxmox will let you run a bunch of different containers or VMs separately
You might look for a used Optiplex SFF or micro form factor PC. These can be purchased for around $100 in the US and have full fledged PC hardware which is capable of running most things. The downside here is less peripheral support for things like PCIE or internal storage.
Rectal sensors work too but can be a pain in the ass to get setup.
The Dell Optiplex micro form factor might be a good option. You can get them cheap on the second hand market (at least here in the US).
Considering the 5 isn’t even being sold yet, I question the validity of your anecdote. The 3B and 4/4B are still hit or miss as far as stock goes. I just bought a 3B from Digikey and it’s the first I’ve seen them in stock since before COVID though it’s not as if I’ve been checking rpilocator daily for updates.
There’s definitely an argument for not supporting the Pi Foundation with their anti-consumer practices over the last few years. They’ve sold out to corporate interests and don’t give a shit about the educational/hobbyist mission of the original Raspberry Pi.
For $100 you can buy a micro form factor Optiplex PC which has several orders of magnitude more computing power, but it does have a bit larger form factor and less ports than what OP listed.
That’s too bad because the specs OP listed are pretty great plus I’d love to see the Raspberry Pi Foundation (or whichever corporate entity controls production and sales) knocked down a few pegs due to their anti-consumer behavior over the last several years.
Definitely read the docs but yes your edit is correct. In ESPHome (in HA) you’ll just edit the config file to tell it, for example, that GPIO pin 5 is connected to a potentiometer and then this becomes an entity in HA.
I’d recommend getting some ESP8266 Wemos D1 mini boards as they’re better suited to this and half the cost of ESP32.
Also you may consider other sensors you could use in this same area like temperature, lux, humidity, etc as they can all be run off the same ESP device in the same ESPHome config and you’ll have plenty of free pins.
Another alternative is to setup a backup server at a willing friend/family members house so that you can physically take the drive and just upload any new changes later.
But with Intel changing their socket every couple generations, you’re talking about a new motherboard too if you want to upgrade.
What’s the storage capacity on this motherboard? I know with their office PCs, you only get 2 SATA ports and typically only a single PCIE slot so you’re forced to choose between a GPU or LSI SAS card. I have a huge media library so this was one of my primary concerns when I specced mine out years ago. Also consider 3.5" drive capacity. Are you limited to just two HDDs?
Wow it didn’t even click in my head that this is a 6th gen Core. How is OP speccing out a custom server using 8 year old parts?
On the other hand, they’re relatively cheap and it gives you a spare to tinker with, or at least that’s what I told myself last week when I ordered another Pi3 since I saw they came back in stock on Digikey after all these years.
The ratgdo seems to do everything MyQ did but locally. What’s the issue?
Unfortunately the PIR sensors you’re using only detect active motion not presence so apart from setting a long “off” delay or a lot of movement while sitting, they won’t be very useful for things like lighting. I think Innovelli and a few other companies make wall switches with mmWave so those might be an option if you don’t have electrical outlets where you need them for standalone sensors.
I googled the sensor and found this github entry. https://github.com/Chreece/LD2411S-ESPHome
Seems like a pretty simple plug and play setup with an ESP device.
R7 gang here. Let us keep the dream alive!