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 3 months ago* (last edited 3 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] 2 points 3 months ago (5 children)

Seems like it would be fine. The N200 does use more power than the N100, or an RPi when idle, but it's maybe 10W? They're selling with a 1-year warranty as well, and an N200 minipc is probably about this same price from an unknown OEM and no warranty, so it's a net win here with a screen and a warranty.

The only BIG issue with this is the battery draw. You'd need to leave this plugged in, which means the PSU+VRU will constantly draw more power than needed by the actual TDW of the machine to keep the battery charged, so it's kind of a power siphon. If you could align the input power and charge this via USB-C, it would be more efficient.

[–] spaghettiwestern 2 points 3 months ago

The one I have draws about 6 watts when running Home Assistant which means at $0.25 per KWH it would cost $1.10 per month to run. Just adding a UPS to any other platform is going to cost more per month and have a much shorter run time.

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