I’m thinking about getting started using Docker and an older Raspberry Pi. I’m already hosting a grafana service on it, so It can’t be fully dedicated to ha. So curious what everyone is using.
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I use a dedicated Raspberry Pi (5, previously had on a 4).
I host everything else on a different server, the HA one is dedicated. Pretty nice because then it can run HAOS and basically manages everything itself.
One factor in keeping it separate was I wanted it to be resilient. I don’t want stuff to stop working if I restart my server or if the server dies for some reason. My messing around on my server is isolated from my smart home.
I also have a separate Pi (4, previously on a Pi 1B) that runs Pi-hole, on it’s own Pi for the same reason - if it stops working or even pauses for a moment, the internet stops working.
People throw a lot of shade at the Pi but I love having dedicated hardware for some more critical projects.
Yeah I run HAOS in a VM but I keep a backup on an SD card that I can pop into a raspi if for whatever reason the server is down.
I have a proxmox host on a HP Elitedesk G3 with an i5 7500. In that I have a VM with HAOS and it runs like a dream. If something goes horribly wrong I can get remote terminal access from the proxmox interface along with rebooting and backing things up.
Also, you can actually run Grafana under HomeAssistant directly, though that does mean if HA is down then you also lose Grafana at the same time. IMO it is reasonable to use lots of stuff alongside HA but monitoring and remote access should be on a separate machine, and for that I have an old laptop (integrated battery so no need for UPS) and that machine is really only for managing remote access and monitoring.
That makes sense. And definitely need to keep my grafana service as is since it’s basically a fitness service that I pair with Garmin. I was thinking about spinning up another instance to keep them separate since I might move the fitness service to a cloud provider eventually. Thanks for sharing!!!
Oh wow, I just had a look at that, normally Grafana is used for monitoring things like server response times and internal stats. Using for a Garmin fitness device is awesome! I would never have thought of it as a good way to get that kind of data and see it visually.
Do you use it to see your training progress over time? Or is it more for seeing specific runs and comparing? How do you actually use it? Is it useful for you?
I use it to keep track of my fitness progress over time mostly. I just got it set up a couple of months ago, so the verdict is still out as to how much I’ll use it over time.
I just cloned the repo and configured it.
It’s rather good and eye opening. It has exposed some needed changes to my sedentary habits.
This is the dashboard and project: https://grafana.com/grafana/dashboards/23245-garmin-stats/
Home Assistant is in a VM in proxmox on a dell micro i5 8th gen. Zeave adapter passed through.
Please note that Home Assistant is officially supported on Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 with 2GB of RAM minimum Raspberry Pi - Home Assistant
If your older rpi is for instance a rpi 3 with 512MB of RAM, I’m not sure it’s going to cut it.
Can confirm: Using a rpi4 with 2GB for a long time worked well.
Huh, I’m running it on a rpi 3B which was (barely) supported when I installed Home Assistant on it. It has only 1GB of memory but it’s still working very well! I don’t have a ton of automations though
raspi 4 in a container.
basically running since the 4 was released
That’s what I was thinking about doing too.
Home Assistant OS on Raspberry Pi 5. Simple and maintenance free.
I host on a raspberry pi 4 in a Docker container. Ive added an ssd to the pi for longevity!
VM under TrueNAS
A Dell 3140 laptop. With HA and a number of other apps it loafs along at about 5% CPU. When Frigate is enabled it jumps up to 14% or so while drawing between 6 and 12 watts. The battery prevents power blinks in our area from being a problem, unlike my Pi4 that crashed and didn’t recover when I was hundreds of miles away. The battery lasts hours when the power fails and the keyboard and display are convenient.
For those concerned about the battery, it’s firmware limited to a 70% charge so it will last years. Current Li-Ion batteries have about a 1 in a million chance of fire. A car parked in your garage is hundreds of times more of a risk.
It’s been excellent and I’d buy it again.
Old desktops that the it guy at a previous job showed me how to request
In Docker on a Synology DS1522+, works well. I used to use the Synology HA app, but it was always some versions behind, and I was pleasantly surprised that backup and restore was easy to move it to Docker. I’d say that if you change your mind about how you host it in future that it will be fairly easy to change.
Can you tell me more about this setup? I’m considering a Synology option.
Sure. Synology DSM is a Linux distro for Synology hardware. DSM includes Docker CE, so you can just use that from the terminal if you want but they also include a “Container Manager” GUI app. I mostly use the app but need to sometimes dip into the terminal when the app gets stuck on updating container images.
There’s not much to mention about Home Assistant specifically, just that you have two options: Docker or the SynoCommunity app. Docker is easier to migrate somewhere else, but with Home Assistant’s backup/restore you’re not locked in to either option.
Anyway, for the pros: it works fine and has the advantage that it has fast access to my data since it’s on the same hardware. It’s also a small power footprint at 50W for 5x3.5" disks, 40GB RAM and 4 CPUs, especially compared to my previous setup of 3 Proxmox nodes using the DiskStation as SAN storage over iSCSI. It’s not as powerful for compute obviously, but much more efficient.
The main con is that it’s Synology, so you are to some extent captive to whatever they are up to. I’ve looked into alternative distros for DiskStations and there aren’t really any options that seemed better to me at the time. YMMV.
That’s kind of what I was thinking of building out actually, so I’ll look into that as an option, thanks!
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@ohlaph Home Assistant OS on a Dell Micro with an i5-6500T in it and 16 GB of RAM.
Runs extremely well, just slow for ESPHome builds so I don’t use the add-on anymore. Also while TTS is plenty fast I couldn’t use any larger than tiny-int8 or base-int8 for faster-whisper. I offloaded that to my server with my old RTX 2070 in it and have it able to run the turbo model for speech to text.
But no Ollama or similar, fuck using those. I’ve only ever gotten uselessness out of them and I ain’t paying someone else to use theirs to do the same thing just with slightly fewer incidents of “I didn’t find a device called <the thing you said but slightly out of order and now the exact same as it’s actually called>”.
Custom SFF PC. Ryzen 2700X, Gigabyte B450i, Intel A380, and some WD red plus drives.
