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.
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.
Up until a couple of weeks I was running it on a dedicated Pi4. It’s now running as a VM in ProxMox on a pair of Lenovo M710q mini PCs I got off ebay for £40 each.
I did load them up with RAM, upgrade the CPUs and add a second NIC so they probably came in at more like the cost of a 16Gb Pi5. Each. The RAM was the pricey part. I’ve measured the power usage and they each use about a 3rd more power than the Pi did which I’m happy with. Given that, the added flexibility of running ProxMox and how quiet they are I’m super happy with the setup.
Oh and I used to run PiHole on another Pi. That’s gone now replaced with Technitium DNS running as a pair of VMs too. That was surprisingly easy to do.
Wow! Tell me you have a mikrotik router so i know you are the twin i’ve never had (not an identical twin though)
Mikrotik Hex S
Good choice! (I got my hands on a ccr1009)
I got a second hand HP Elitedesk mini from ebay. they are small and quite affordable.
I run way to many stuff on it.
VM under TrueNAS
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.
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
Can confirm: Using a rpi4 with 2GB for a long time worked well.
HomeAssistant Yellow
Old desktops that the it guy at a previous job showed me how to request
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.
I host on a raspberry pi 4 in a Docker container. Ive added an ssd to the pi for longevity!
3rd or 4th gen Intel NUC with an i5 and 16GB RAM. Running proxmox with 1 VM (Home Assistant) and about 10 LXC.
Pi4 w/ SSD.
A Xeon E5-2650v4 on a Supermicro X10DRL-i and like a million dollars worth (128GB) of DDR4.
I moved home assistant from a raspberry pi 4 to a NUC a few years back with a few other services (ZigBee, mqtt, etc) and it’s been fantastic. I’m also running frigate on the same system with a Google Coral for object detection and it handles the load of several network camera feeds well.
I’m hosting on an desktop PC. Basically my old machine, but freshly installed with Ubuntu server and a few HDDs added.