HA on RPi?

[SeaGal]

Just trying to get my head around installing HA on a Raspberry Pi 5 running Raspbian.

The HA guides recommend completely imaging the RPi with the HA 'specific purpose OS'.

Is it not possible to just run HA as a stand-alone application alongside other stuff? Anyone done this? Have RPi 5 with 8G RAM and SSD, so have plenty of processing power.

 

[kommando]

HA on a Raspbian is unsupported and will not install unless you get round some deliberate code set to stop you, even then it fails. Been there and got the T shirt. Went instead for HA OS on a mini Windows PC, everytime it rebooted it took my router out and the home network died. Now I just use Raspbian with node-red display pulling data from MQTT.

I followed this unsuccessfully

Guide: How to install Home Assistant supervised on Rpi4 with RaspiOS (64 bit) - October 2022

Warning The following installation instructions, for Home Assistant Supervised on Raspberry Pi OS, will produce an unsupported version of Home Assistant. Why? Because official support is provided exclusively for Home Assistant Supervised on Debian and no other version of Linux (not even any...

community.home-assistant.io

 

[wattmatters]

I outgrew using my RPi4 for Home Assistant, it just didn't have the grunt, storage or backup capability I felt important as Home Assistant grew and became more important to our home's operation. I migrated to a mini PC using Proxmox to set up virtual machines, one of which is Home Assistant.

I recently repurposed the RPi4 as a second instance of Solar Assistant dedicated to monitoring my LiFePO4 batteries.

 

[hotnoob]

grab a cheap used USFF pc, you'll get the full power of a computer, even out performing older servers. as @wattmatters mentioned, HA is a bit of a resource hog, especially as you add more and more to it. storing, and specifically computing all of that statistical data can add up fast.

i'm using a HP t640 thinclient ( was $50 used ), running a whole hypervisor ( proxmox ) on it with a few vms! basically a home server on a THINCLIENT ( which is normally just used to remote into your virtual workstation ), so it's theoretically less powerful than a USFF, but more than enough oompf.

a usff is basically a laptop in a box, but smaller, and thus more energy efficient, can expect a draw of ~5-10 watts if you use a ssd in it.
when you include the used electronics market in your decision making, rasperry pis suddenly become a total rip off

--

if your lucky enough to find a used hp microserver for cheap, that's probably an ideal setup. 25 watts and you have a full fledged server with raid. dual eth, so you could toss your router and plop on pfsense in a vm... but now i'm going overboard

 

[profesor79]

I was killing a SD card a week, having only connected 2 inverters and a few temperature sensors :D.
Raspi is great if you really have to store a few measuremnts per hour in my opinion, unless you can connect a HDD/SSD (been threre too).
I had many versions of HA installed, starting from running from docker, then CORE, and finally using a dedicated VM.
Over time I moved all telemetry data to INFLUX, and have Grafana to visualize it, Node Red to sync, and at the end of the day, HA is used to be an on/off solution and quick battery overview.




now my data on grafana dashboard