Home Automation

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Home automation is the residential extension of building automation.

It is automation of the home, housework or household activity.

Home automation may include centralized control of lighting, HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning), appliances, security locks of gates and doors and other systems, to provide improved convenience, comfort, energy efficiency and security.

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Repurposing "old" PC for home automation: how to make use of a completely overkill system? (alien.top)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I've got a PC the kids and I built years ago as a gaming machine that we don't use anymore. Thinking of repurposing it for use with my home automation setup (replacing my current Raspberry Pi 4 with Home Assistant installed).

It's certainly COMPLETELY overkill for that, so I'm curious what other ways I can make use of it as a home automation server of some sort. Or maybe there's some reason it's actually a bad idea to use it at all for this?

Specs...

CPU: Intel i3-8100 3.6Ghz
Memory: 8GB
Storage: 2TB
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti
Motherboard: B360M Pro-VDH MS-7B24

Currently has Windows 11 installed on it.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

This. If it's completely overkill it's likely going to use a lot of power and you'll pay for compute power that you don't actually need.

I'd stick with the pi4. I had 12 or so services running on it without problems.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Not only that depending on how old you might get something much more powerful in a little fanless case that uses way less power. Especially if ARM architecture. Though there are decent Intel chips targeted t this market.