homeassistant

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Home Assistant is open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server. Available for free at home-assistant.io

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Excellent Home Assistant Platform (www.ebay.com)

submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by spaghettiwestern to c/[email protected]

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Dell Outlet on Ebay has the Latitude 3140 laptop, an excellent Home Assistant platform on sale for $176. A Raspberry Pi 5 or NUC with the hardware needed for these features would cost far more. The same machine is nearly 2x more on the regular Dell Outlet site.

Debian 12 supported out of box - no additional drivers needed
Fast N200 Intel processor - ~60% faster than a Raspberry Pi 5
256gb SSD
8GB ram
Advanced BIOS options
OpenVino support for Frigate
BIOS battery management.  Can limit charge to 75% for years of battery life
6 hour indicated battery life at 75% charge
Very low power usage - ~6 watts when running Home Assistant with several USB devices
Fanless and completely silent
Built like a tank

Negatives:

Built like a tank. Chunky for a small laptop
No integrated Ethernet port
Mediocre screen

I bought one of these last year when it was on sale from another vendor and have been really happy with it, especially for the cost.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

At the same time, you've got a baked in UPS. I'm not sure what the normal power refresh cycle is on them compared to a laptop battery but it seems like it might be negligible?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Well, I mean sure, but how much of your HA stuff runs without power to the rest of the house? Haha

At least in my case, I mostly use it to automate things that require power, like lights and climate control. My battery powered sensors would keep working, but they'd not be doing anything but reporting back info that isn't actionable.

[–] spaghettiwestern 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The point of a UPS or equivalent is to protect the SSD during a power failure. I've lost Raspberry Pi configurations several times due to power failures when I'm away from the house. It has been a major PITA and time consuming to recover from.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Yeah, and like I've got DNS through PiHole on the same machine as HA. That particular machine doesn't always want to come back up after power failure. And I hate going to the basement except to do laundry or bury the bodies. Having constant uptime is just useful.